Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

That most dangerous of opponents: the one who took pains to comprehend the position of his adversary.

I wish my readers took less of my time - about a third of my working time goes to them - but I love and need them all.

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.

I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth.

At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

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.

One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.

If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.

Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

Have a working spouse, because you won't earn a living from writing - not at first, if ever. My wife worked for years to support us.

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale.

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.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.

In fact, I believe that we need better sex education in our own culture, here in America, so that young folk learn about things like venereal disease before they encounter it.

But I don't read or listen for pleasure. I have too much else to do.

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.

I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

When one person makes an accusation check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.

I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so.

But if we learn to think of it as anticipation, as learning, as growing, if we think of the time we spend waiting for the big things of life as an opportunity instead of a passing of time, what wonderful horizons open out!

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

Hollywood... a city I was to come back to time and again, in sickness and in health, in success and in failure, with anticipation and with dread.

He who matures early lives in anticipation.

The racing driver's mind has to have the ability to have amazing anticipation, coordination, and reflex. Because of the speed the car goes.

Conscience in most men, is but the anticipation of the opinions of others.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

There is no more respected or influential forum in the field of journalism than the New York Times. I look forward, with great anticipation, to contributing to its op-ed page.

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

I have good anticipation, and good reaction to the the ball because I've played so many matches in my life.

An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.

As Daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.