"The Rise of Endymion is absolutely the last of the 'Hyperion' books. It's not the last thing I'll ever write in that universe -- there's a novelette I need to write -- but it is the last novel..."

"Sometimes it's a dirty trick when a writer continues a tale and you find out that there were unreliable narrators, or something that seemed to be told in all candor actually wasn't as it appeared. That irritates me sometimes when I read, but I did that in The Fall of Hyperion -- some of the things in Hyperion were not as first perceived. And I have to say, in The Rise of Endymion, there's more of that. Not in the sense of a trick, I hope, but in the sense of finally getting a clear perspective on what was going on in the preceding three books..."

"...The older I get, the more fascinated I get with environmentalism, not as a movement, but as the powerful, almost sacred force of ecology as a concept. I just read a quote by a soil expert who paraphrased Haldane: 'Ecology is more complicated than we think. It's more complicated that we can ever think.' That's the essence of chaos mathematics, isn't it? Certainly ecology is the most complex thing we as human beings encounter, even on an emotional level: our relation to other life and the Earth..."

"I'm finally getting around to writing my Hemingway-character novel, called The Crook Factory -- which was Hemingway's phrase for the counterespionage group he set up in Cuba in 1942. He became an amateur counterspy, began blundering around trying to find German agents, and so forth... It feels different from anything I've tried before, and that's what I gravitate to. There's no fantasy in it, except for the fact that some of my characters are fictional, and I have to move a few of the actual, historical figures around, to put them in different places for plot purposes..."

"Fitzgerald said everybody has perhaps six to ten formative events in his or her lifetime that you really write about, and you just keep writing about them over and over in different contexts, disguising it different ways... My boredom quotient is low, but I do come back to the same themes. I have no idea at this point where my fiction might head. I do know I want to write a ghost story at some point..."