1.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
2.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
3.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
4.
Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.
Kevin J. Anderson
5.
A moment of consideration often prevents a thousand apologies
Kevin J. Anderson
6.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
7.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
8.
Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
Kevin J. Anderson
9.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
10.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
11.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
12.
If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.
Kevin J. Anderson
13.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
14.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
15.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
16.
There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.
Kevin J. Anderson
17.
Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.
Kevin J. Anderson
18.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
19.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
20.
I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.
Kevin J. Anderson
21.
The real key is time management and being able to focus on what you need to, on using every available minute to accomplish something that needs to be done.
Kevin J. Anderson
22.
When tending a vast and beautiful garden, you have to plant many seeds, never knowing ahead of time which ones will germinate, which will produce the most glorious flowers, which will bear the sweetest fruit. A good gardener plants them all, tends and nurtures them, and wishes them well. Optimism is the best fertilizer.
Kevin J. Anderson
23.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
24.
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?
Kevin J. Anderson
25.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
26.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
27.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
28.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
29.
My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.
Kevin J. Anderson
30.
That's what people need to remember about reviewers; opinions can be all over the spectrum, and you just need to find a reviewer whose tastes match your own.
Kevin J. Anderson
31.
Patrick Rothfuss gives us a fabulous debut, standing firmly on the main stage of the fantasy genre and needing no warm-up act. Jordan and Goodkind must be looking nervously over their shoulders!
Kevin J. Anderson
32.
SHADOW PROWLER is a fresh, exuberant take on territory that will be familiar to all fans of classic high fantasy. Alexey Pehov introduces a cast of charming, quirky, unsavory, even loathesome characters in a fast-paced, entertaining adventure.
Kevin J. Anderson
33.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
34.
ELANTRIS is a new BEN HUR for the fantasy genre, with a sweeping, epic storyline and closely personal characters.
Kevin J. Anderson
35.
I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books.
Kevin J. Anderson
36.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
37.
We must think beyond ourselves
Kevin J. Anderson
38.
No, no, no - you don't argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and therefore leave no room for rational thought.
Kevin J. Anderson
39.
The best place to start an adventure is with a quiet, perfect life . . . and someone who realizes that it can’t possibly be enough.
Kevin J. Anderson
40.
I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.
Kevin J. Anderson
41.
I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
Kevin J. Anderson
42.
I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.
Kevin J. Anderson
43.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
44.
There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.
Kevin J. Anderson
45.
We each have our lives... What matters is not how long those lives last, but what we do with them.
Kevin J. Anderson
46.
Well, I know that George Lucas doesn't like it at all. When I was working on The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, he told me that he would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and smashed.
Kevin J. Anderson
47.
Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.
Kevin J. Anderson
48.
We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.
Kevin J. Anderson
49.
When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.
Kevin J. Anderson
50.
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.
Kevin J. Anderson
