In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.

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

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.

I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

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

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present.

We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.

I did work out every day. I needed it to have the endurance to do what needed to be done and not get hurt. I have such a new respect for action stars now.

Good managers have a bias for action.

Oh yeah, I'm a huge romance fan. And some women like action.

If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

To stop terrorists before the strike, we must do three things: deny them entry into the country, curtail their freedom of action inside the country, and deprive them of material and moral support from within the country.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.

The time has come for the American government to recognize the damage that has occurred to our economy, and to take firm action to curtail what I believe is both unfair and illegal foreign competition.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

There are two good things in life - freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

You have to understand the tone of the movie, because if it's supposed to be funny, it can be funny violent like the Home Alone stuff, but you have to really understand the tone of what you're doing and make the action work for that and for the character.

It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.

The decision to go to war is the most important decision that I can make as a representative in Congress. As a veteran, I see any potential military action first through the eyes of the young men and women who volunteered to wear the uniform and would carry out such a mission.

The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

I'd really like to get the girl, shoot the gun, drive the car, have fun. I even have these kind of action dreams, where I'm the action guy.