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

Who would you be but who you are?

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

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.