Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!

Robert Jordan... is a lot of writer

Bink knew the dolphin only from old pictures; it was a kind of magic fish that breathed air instead of water.

When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.

Barbarian --A Code of Conduct honored by all true barbarian warriors, requiring excellent coordination with weapons, closeness to nature, awkwardness with women, common sense, and completion of the mission.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.