 Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that. |
| I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program. |
| The people who make policy decisions should damned well know what they are talking about before they make the decisions. There is nobody who is an expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing Attack of the Clones. |
| I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books. |
| I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published. |
| I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication. |
| Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I'd rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive. |
| One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe. |
| We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up. |
| If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people. |
| If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be. |
| Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged. |
| I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory. |
| Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything? |
| It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas. |
| I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too. |
| Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too. |
| The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them. |
| There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature. |
| If you look at the British royal family and take away the scandals and the goofy stuff that's going on, people love to have this king to look up to - the royals are like celebrities. |
