Popularity: 0
Vote:   | Because I've done these Dune books, and I'm a big outdoor hiker and mountain climber, I think that you can get along just fine with forests and things. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Dune can be read on so many different levels. I really get different things out of it every time I read it. You can read it as just a plain old space adventure story, people being stranded on a desert planet that has giant sandworms on it, but you can also read it and get politics and economics out of it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Dune has all the big, epic vastness of the galaxy, with politics, economics, intrigues and wheels within wheels plots. But they don't have any aliens or anything. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I always had this non-stop drive. I had to keep sending stories out and every once in awhile I'd get something accepted or get the little trickle of positive feedback. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I did a total of 54 projects for LucasFilm: I did novels, anthologies, a young adult series co-written with my wife, comics, pop-up books and all kinds of things. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I did some stuff for the X-Files that are directly lifted from my daily work at the lab Lawrence Livermore. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I do a lot of hiking and walking and I carry my tape recorder with me to dictate writing, or I just think and put down notes. I just went out for days, and I couldn't stop talking about creating characters and building the worlds. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I don't think anybody is particularly worried anymore that their Apple Macintosh is going to take over the world. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I felt that since I'm doing the H.G. Wells book and I did Captain Nemo, that it seemed like an obvious thing for me to be doing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It's a fun movie. It's very fast and very sharply edited. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I have a physics and astronomy background. If you have the means to do what I described to do, the physics actually works. I have enough of a science background that it has to at least make sense. I don't have people opening their helmets in space and trying to breathe vacuum for awhile or some of the other bizarre things. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I hired an artist to do a bunch of background work for me. He was the painter and the artist who did a wonderful Star Trek graphic novel that my wife and I wrote called The Gorn Crisis. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I just get too many phone calls during the day. If I'm in the middle of a scene and the phone rings, it really disrupts my concentration. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I multiprocess. I'm hiking and writing at the same time, so it's not like I'm taking a day off. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I never, not for a nanosecond, doubted that I was going to become a writer. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I always knew that everything else I was doing in my life was leading up to it: every job that I had I was learning something that I would later apply to my writing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I read comic books and Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton, who was one of my favorite science fiction authors. The first adult novel that I read was H. G. Wells' The Time Machine when I was 8 or 9 years old. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I think one of our manifest destinies is to get people up in space, whether it's a colony on the Moon or on Mars, or just in a practical commercial sense, that you want to build factories in orbit because you can make things there cheaper. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think that you make time for the things that are important. You don't waste time on things that aren't important. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I wanted my bad guys to be... suave and intelligent. I think Darth Vader is a better villain than the Emperor, because he's conflicted and he's got more personality. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was 5 years old and that was the point at which I decided that this was the stuff was for me: the giant Martians blasting with their heat rays and dying because the germs killed them at the end. To a 5-year-old, that took the cake. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was going to send Frank Herbert the first signed copy of my very first book. So I got his home address. The book was then bought by Signet. But by the time that the book was brought out in paperback, nine months later or so, Frank Herbert had died of cancer. I just missed him. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I won't diss the movie, because it brought lots of readers to the original books. But my Star Wars readers knew they liked my writing, and decided to give my Dune books a try. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm not convinced that the NASA space program is the best and most efficient way to retool everything. However, I'd rather that they build another space shuttle and that we'd at least have four of them working than just sitting around waiting for some miracle to happen. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I'm not just a successful writer in the science fiction genre, I'm am just the geekiest fan boy in my heart. To think that I can pick up the phone and call Harlan Ellison or that I get letters from Arthur C. Clarke is just about as cool as it gets. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I'm playing amateur psychologist here, but these are very diehard fans and I think there's a little bit of jealousy here. I think they wish they had gotten picked to write Star Wars books. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I've always felt, even when I was a bachelor working full-time and coming home from work at 5:30 at night, that I would take the time to cook myself a couple of chicken breasts and make a salad or something because I work too hard, and I deserve to have a decent meal instead of heating up a pot pie or something like that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I've been hiking up in the snow in the Sierra Nevadas when I was writing a Star Wars scene where they're on a polar ice cap of another planet. So that's direct and obvious sensory input. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I've been learning all the different aspects of how to juggle multiple plotlines, how to build the worlds and the technologies and the characters, the monsters and everything, and I wanted to write something that was all my own, because my two biggest writing successes in my writing career have been the Dune books and the Star Wars books. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I've climbed all the 14,000 foot peaks here in Colorado and I'm doing another one this coming Saturday. You can get into a sort of fugue state and concentrate without interruption about your scene or your world or your character or whatever you're doing. |
Popularity: 10
Vote: | I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If you started getting Hiltons up in orbit, they would be full every day of the year. Because people would pay to go up there. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | In the book you have a planet where the trees are sentient and this special group of people can communicate with them. But instead of trees walking around like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, these trees sit there and love to experience other things vicariously, because they have roots; they can't walk around and do things. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Isaac Asimov had computers the size of planets and things like that. Which were great concepts at the time they came out, but when you read them now, they seem a little bit quaint and old-fashioned. Whereas, Frank Herbert, was almost utterly separated from technology. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It used to be that if somebody was writing a 700-page book, you would give them a couple of years to write it. You really couldn't expect it any faster than that. Now I'm writing a 700-page book in the Seven Suns series and an 800-page book in the Dune series with Brian every year, plus two or three other books. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Jules Verne really and truly was a good friend of Alexander Dumas, he was trying to write for Dumas, but Dumas got into financial troubles and told Verne to go write his own stuff instead. Then Dumas fled France. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Jules Verne's real life is pretty much sanitized for the book. I did lots of research on him and the more I read, the more I started to hate him. He was really a putz. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | My schedule is to get up at 6:30 or 7:00 and I'll usually work out and have breakfast and start writing by, say, 8:30 in the morning. I work non-stop until I have to stop to make supper. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Once I finally sold my first book, at the age of 25-this was after hundreds and hundreds of rejection letters-once I got my foot in the door, it's like they grabbed my foot and dragged the rest of my leg in. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | One of my very favorite things to do is to write bad guys. Because I learned that bad guys never think of themselves as the bad guy. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Star Wars has all the color, the humor, the action, the monsters and lots of aliens, so why not come up with an epic storyline that has all the politics, wheels within wheels stuff from Dune, but all the color and space battles and aliens from Star Wars, and just turn everything loose? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The Green Priests are like the tree spirits or the people living out in the forest; you also have another group called the Roamers, who are like the Gypsies. The Ildirans, the old, dying empire that has been around so long that they are kind of on the wane, are like the Elves. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The one that I make when I'm really trying to impress someone who's coming over is a killer lasagna recipe that's been in my family for five generations. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The science fiction community is like a small, tightly-knit dysfunctional family. We all either know each other or have mutual friends. So it's not really hard to get in touch with someone. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The thing that makes something classified in a document is a number after a decimal point on a table on page 43 of a 300-page document because it has something to do with a nuclear cross-section or something like that. There aren't folders full of stuff like secret stealth airplanes that are being built in Area 51 or something like that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | This forest is like a gigantic library or databank, and they can tap into it to get any information they want. Because all these trees are interconnected. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | This was somewhat of a surprise to me, but a lot of people picked up our books first without ever having read Dune. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Today, we're walking around with Palm Pilots. What if we could just implant the Palm Pilot so we could just access the stuff instantaneously? That's I think. It won't be giant robots standing there with bullwhips. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We are always going to get stuck on needing oil and it's always going to seem unfair to us that the most valuable resource in the world is buried under this ugly bunch of sand duness out in the middle of countries where the people have cultures and religions that we don't understand. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We need to have a regular commerce between the surface of the Earth and at least near-Earth orbit from which we can build other things and send them to the Moon or further. It's the stepping stone. You have to have it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | What gets me about that is that you have people talking about cloning and they are saying things that anybody with eighth-grade science knows that what they're saying is wrong. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | What the Terran Hanseatic League find maddeningly ironic is that these primitive people who talk to trees are the only ones who can communicate instantaneously across large distances. And this is the science being realistic. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | When I was a little boy... I knew I wanted to basically turn a gas giant planet into a small sun to warm up the small moons around it, so people could terraform it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You can still have a very happy and productive and comfortable life if you are in a situation where you are fully cooperating with nature instead of cutting down the rain forest to build condominiums. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | You can't just send cameras up to orbit and that's it. It's the difference between looking at a National Geographic magazine and actually walking around in Morocco. You must have people who are actually there. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You must develop your own work, become established as an author, before you would ever be asked to work in an established universe. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | You need the romance. It's not a book about romance, certainly. The whole plot is not about the main characters getting into a clinch. You have to have heroic, archetypal characters and when you're following the epic storylines, there has to be the greatest love in the universe, the star-crossed lovers who somehow can't ever get together. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You need to write something publishable before you need to worry about the mechanics of it. Before you even have written a story, they are worried about how you're going to find someone to sell the movie rights to. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | You research the book, you outline the book, you write the 400-500 page book, you edit the 400-500 page book, then worry about how to get an agent. |