Top 100 Alan Dean Foster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.”

— Alan Dean Foster

2. “Spontaneity is one of the joys of existence, especially if you prepare for it in advance.”

— Alan Dean Foster

3. “The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”

— Alan Dean Foster

4. “An apex is always surrounded only by emptiness.”

— Alan Dean Foster

5. “We’re all nothing but unified arrangements of atoms and particles, drifting around, enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.”

— Alan Dean Foster

6. “First comes the day Then comes the night. After the darkness Shines through the light. The difference, they say, Is only made right By the resolving of gray Through refined Jedi sight. – Journal of the Whills, 7:477.”

— Alan Dean Foster

7. “The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.”

— Alan Dean Foster

9. “Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.”

— Alan Dean Foster

10. “No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams.”

— Alan Dean Foster

11. “It is always hard when reality intrudes on belief.”

— Alan Dean Foster

12. “In loquaciousness lay insanity.”

— Alan Dean Foster

13. “The Supreme Leader’s voice was flat. “You have compassion for her.” “No – never. Compassion? For an enemy of the Order?” “I perceive the problem,” Snoke intoned. “It isn’t her strength that is making you fail. It’s your weakness.” The rebuke hurt, but Ren didn’t show it.”

— Alan Dean Foster

14. “Acknowledge beauty when you see it. Even if its appearance disturbs you, surely you can admire the skill that went into its design.”

— Alan Dean Foster

15. “Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.”

— Alan Dean Foster

16. “I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.”

— Alan Dean Foster

Featured in: Reading Quotes

17. “Captain Phasma. Remember me?” He moved his weapon slightly. “Here’s my blaster, ya still wanna inspect it?” Phasma held on to her dignity. “Yes, I remember you. FN-2187.” Finn shook his head curtly. “Not anymore. My name is Finn. A real name for a real person. And I’m in charge now.”

— Alan Dean Foster

18. “In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.”

— Alan Dean Foster

19. “He stood on the sand watching the double sunset as first one and then the other of Tatooine’s twin suns sank slowly behind the distant range of dunes. In the fading light the sands turned gold, russet, and flaming red-orange before advancing night put the bright colors to sleep for another day.”

— Alan Dean Foster

20. “I do not ‘gallivant,‘” Truzenzuzex commented primly. “I plan in haste.”

— Alan Dean Foster

21. “Forgive me. I feel it again. The pull to the light. The Supreme Leader senses it. Show me again the power of the darkness, and I will let nothing stand in our way.”

— Alan Dean Foster

22. “Getting inside the mind of a terrorist wasn’t difficult at all. Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies. We’re not a particular species. Check out popular video games.”

— Alan Dean Foster

23. “Back to Jak – Why does everyone always want to go back to Jakku? There’s nothing there! Sand and junk and rocks and sand and quicksand and sand – I don’t get it!”

— Alan Dean Foster

24. “The storm hit with all the fury of a woman who’d been dieting for six months, only to discover she’d gained four pounds.”

— Alan Dean Foster

25. “It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium.”

— Alan Dean Foster

26. “Living gives you a better understanding of life. I would hope that my characters have become deeper and more rounded personalities. Wider travels have given me considerably greater insight into how cultural differences affect not only people, but politics and art.”

— Alan Dean Foster

27. “A man with a gun may hunt a tiger during the day with some expectation of success. Turn out his light, put the man in the jungle at night, surround him with the unknown and all his primitive fears return. Advantage to the tiger.”

— Alan Dean Foster

28. “The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.”

— Alan Dean Foster

29. “If you’re crazy, there’s two things you can do to make yourself feel better: One is to get yourself cured. The other is to make everyone you have to deal with crazy.”

— Alan Dean Foster

30. “Revenge is little more than an adolescent concession to personal vanity.”

— Alan Dean Foster

31. “When people don’t have access to facts, they invent what they’d like to believe, or what they think others would like to hear.”

— Alan Dean Foster

32. “There is nothing in art, in philosophy, or in politics to match the fervor of mutual cooperation among discordant bands of fanatics.”

— Alan Dean Foster

33. “How much research I have to do depends on the nature of the story. For fantasy, none at all.”

— Alan Dean Foster

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

34. “Without the Jedi, there can be no balance in the Force, and all will be given over to the dark side.”

— Alan Dean Foster

35. “The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so.”

— Alan Dean Foster

36. “The black mask, with its slittled forehead and thick, snoutlike breathing apparatus, covered the face of the man he knew as Kylo Ren. Once, he had known the face behind the mask. Once, he has known the man himself. Now, to Lor San Tekka, only the mask was left. Metal instead of a man.”

— Alan Dean Foster

37. “She had seen this man before, in a daydream. In a nightmare.”

— Alan Dean Foster

38. “Hux refused to pace, regarding it as a waste of energy.”

— Alan Dean Foster

39. “Death displays nothing if not variety in its methods, which are often surprising and sometimes amusing.”

— Alan Dean Foster

40. “I’ve been writing full-time since 1978.”

— Alan Dean Foster

41. “But then, to those behind the First Order, sowing fear and terror was merely politics by another means.”

— Alan Dean Foster

42. “Oh really? You’re cold?”

— Alan Dean Foster

43. “The trooper spoke while staring nervously down the corridor. “Because it’s the right thing to do.” Poe shook his head, not buying it for a second. “Buddy, if we’re gonna do this, we have to be honest with each other.” The trooper stared at him for a long moment. “I need a pilot.”

— Alan Dean Foster

44. “It is you,” Ren murmured. His words unsettled her: Not for the first time, he seemed to know more about her than she did about herself.”

— Alan Dean Foster

45. “There was no reply. That in itself was encouraging. They trudged on, Luke stealing admiring glances at her when she wasn’t looking.”

— Alan Dean Foster

46. “Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn’t done too badly.”

— Alan Dean Foster

47. “Definitely this man was not now and never had been a stormtrooper or anything like it. What he had been, maybe, was someone not unlike herself. A bit of a businessman, a bit of a con man, a bit of an adventurer. And since he was older, it was only reasonable to assume that he had been a bit more of all of those things than herself.”

— Alan Dean Foster

48. “Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.”

— Alan Dean Foster

Featured in: Reading Quotes

49. “She was nearly twenty, with dark hair, darker eyes, and a hint of something deeper within. There was a freshness about her that the surrounding harsh landscape had failed to eliminate. Anyone glancing at her would have thought her soft: a serious error of judgment.”

— Alan Dean Foster

50. “There was a freshness about her that the surrounding harsh landscape had failed to eliminate.”

— Alan Dean Foster