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I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.