For an author just starting out, you've got to deliver the goods every year or sooner or people will forget you or you will lose momentum. There is a contract that exists between author and reader.

I've never been averse to a little risk - after all, writing without risk is not really writing at all. Sometimes one has to just let fly with a high concept piece and see where the pieces fall. As it generally turns out, the central story is familiar, but just with different rules of engagement.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath.

Personally I have a great deal of fun doing it, which is an inspiration in itself really. It really allows me to daydream, as in "schooldream" which is daydreaming with ink and get paid for it which is something I don't say to schools when I go in and talk to them.

Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought--and more reading.

...the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment.

Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.