 Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. |
| I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out. |
| I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books. |
| I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood. |
| In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives. |
| A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore. |
| Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own. |
| On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up. |
| My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago. |
| Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon. |
| We forget that what matters begins with the imagination. |
| I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world. |
| Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones. |
| Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level. |
| I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable. |
| After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once. |
| Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination. |
| When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment. |
| For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time. |
| What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly. |
