Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.

I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.

Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.

No, my publisher has always done the marketing.

I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.

My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.

I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

I'm just writing a story that I want to read.

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

I really fell in love with Africa.

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I like the storytelling and reading the letters, the long-distance dedications. Anytime in radio that you can reach somebody on an emotional level, you're really connecting.

Out all of these zillions of letters, one of the first ones that came was, as it turned out from Johnny Carson within the last five or six weeks of his life. I had worked with him. He lost a son who had worked for me.

I started getting letters from college in the tenth grade.

You know these love letters mix with whisky, just don't light a match when you kiss me.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.

Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.

There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.

More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.

I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage.

It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.

Most well-known serial killers have victims numbering in the dozens, have sent taunting letters to the police or have done bizarre things to the bodies.