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.

Well, I think that as a country, we’ve drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.

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.

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.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

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.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

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.

A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.

I have learned to do more with less, so you don’t see the big books anymore.