"Another bit of bad timing as far as my position on the bestseller lists was concerned was that it also came out simultaneously with Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. And the bird knocked me out."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: David Eddings

• "After I'd seen the 73rd printing of the second book of Lord of the Rings, ..."
• "All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme ..."
• "Americans are absolutely convinced the melody for Greensleeves is a Christmas hymn. It was composed ..."
• "Boeing was unsympathetic, so I parted company with them and we went to the upper ..."
• "But it isn't only younger readers who write to me. I'm getting the middle range, ..."
• "But it's been around for so long that if I tried to change it now ..."
• "But my draft board was very understanding. They would send me a letter every Fall ..."
• "Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching ..."
• "Carson City is the most peaceful little town you have ever seen, with about 40,000 ..."
• "Down on the bottom shelf was a copy of The Two Towers, the second volume ..."
• "Everybody who is the least bit talented at this sort of thing is going to ..."
• "Finally I came up with a complete mythology, various theologies, and a serious bad guy, ..."
• "Fortunately they didn't send me to Korea; they sent me to Germany, and with two ..."
• "Frank Herbert was the fellow who unfortunately received th brunt of this discovery when they ..."
• "Having saved a few dollars, we lived frugally for year and I wrote what was ..."
• "He did point out that I'd receive advances for five books as opposed to advances ..."
• "He said the only way you can get around it is to come up with ..."
• "Here's a girl who's gone through some upstate college, majored in boyfriends, had the obligatory ..."
• "High Hunt did very well, and there was even some talk about a film. But ..."
• "I believed that if you were going to write a long fantasy it was supposed ..."
• "I can only sleep for a few hours, then I'm going to get up whether ..."
• "I did do one or two short stories in the science-fiction mode in my mid-20s, ..."
• "I did fairly well and got a good background in academic English studies. "
• "I didn't even know Del Rey Books existed; I simply sent my letter of enquiry ..."
• "I feel a sense of responsibility, so I'm pretty vague when I get to sorcery. "
• "I finally sent it off, and rather surprisingly - well, it was astonishing to me ..."
• "I get fan mail. Do I ever get fan mail. Naturally, because I'm writing in ..."
• "I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed ..."
• "I got a scholarship and went to Reed, a rather prestigious college in Oregon. I ..."
• "I got employment with Boeing in the aerospace industry in Seattle. I wound up being ..."
• "I got him off my back by something that probably sent him straight to the ..."
• "I got married at that time and we sort of bounced around the country emplacing ..."
• "I have a speech in the middle of my current novel, The Shining Ones, delivered ..."
• "I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of ..."
• "I made the mistake of telling them I'd done three years in the National Guard, ..."
• "I may stray once in a while, but I stay pretty close to the road ..."
• "I picked it up and saw it was published by Ballantine. Now Ballantine, unlike many ..."
• "I protested First Amendment rights and a number of othe things, and finally decided I ..."
• "I refined the gimmick so that when a character does something with magic it makes ..."
• "I should say that I grew to love Lester dearly but he and I fought ..."
• "I spent a great deal of time studying Middle English and got fairly competent in ..."

• "I spent more taxpayers' money than I'll ever be able to replace. Everything we were ..."
• "I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years, at which point ..."
• "I think I know the formula for water and I believe I know Newton's Third ..."
• "I think the third character who appears in the Elenium is a prostitute, a little ..."
• "I took two or three seminars on Chaucer, and one on Malory. It was getting ..."
• "I use the gimmick of the will is the word. Which means that when a ..."
• "I was buying very exotic things, none of which I understood. I'd take the specs ..."
• "I was convinced I was going to become an actor. I wasn't bad at it, ..."
• "I was struggling along and making half-hearted attempts to get back into teaching. But the ..."
• "I was supposed to be working on a book at the time, and it was ..."
• "I was terribly offended. But since I'd already signed a contract I didn't have too ..."
• "I was unaware that Poppa Tolkien wanted to do the whole of Lord of the ..."
• "I wasn't very happy about that. I had absolutely perfect climaxes for each of the ..."
• "I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that ..."
• "I'd be hopelessly incompetent in producing a female character without her assistance. I'm sorry, but ..."
• "I'm also getting people of advanced years. Even more advanced than mine, which is a ..."
• "I'm done moving now. I'm setting down roots. I like this place. "
• "I'm enough of a pessimist that I'm going to continue writing fantasy. "
• "I'm having a great deal of fun pushing against those boundaries of prissiness and inserting ..."
• "I'm horribly incompetent at anything mechanical, and mathematically I'm inept. Which is why my wife ..."
• "I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the ..."
• "I've got eight years of college English behind me, and extensive reading in the classics, ..."
• "If I could figure out a way to persuade Barbara Cartland to refer to her ..."
• "If I'm dealing realistically with the Middle Ages I'm going to have to have pickpockets, ..."
• "If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own. "
• "If things were going to hell then everybody wanted to read fantasy, because it took ..."
• "If you're trying to tiptoe through the tulips and sneak your way through the back ..."
• "If you've got some 14 year-old kid with terminal acne who's absolutely convinced that if ..."
• "In those days one of those rules was that the cover price of paperbacks could ..."
• "It gets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans and ..."
• "It was at the end of the Korean nonsense and we had the draft at ..."
• "It's also a matter of relying on a routine. You know if you go to ..."
• "It's the Superman complex, isn't it? If you're more powerful than a locomotive and can ..."
• "Lester Del Rey could say, 'Fantasy is the most prissy of all art forms.' He ..."
• "Lester said, 'What you're proposing is a trilogy that's probably going to run between 1500 ..."
• "Many of the characters - those poor, broken-down, pathetic people - I used to wait ..."
• "Maybe that was fate, because I can relate the interest directly to what I'm doing ..."
• "My gimmick is that magic is tiring. Wizardry poops you out. So doing something with ..."
• "My original perception of how you did these things was based almost entirely on The ..."
• "My work is a direct outgrowth of medieval roman and I, unlike Tolkien, adore Tennyson, ..."

• "Not to turn my fantasy into pornography or anything of this nature, but just to ..."
• "Now we get a two-room suite and I take the current manuscript along. I still ..."
• "Occasionally I get unwelcome attention too, of course. I received some really strange correspondence from ..."
• "On the subject of magic, incidentally, the fact that she is a little too specific ..."
• "People from California come over and carry our taxes for us. Many time we'd be ..."
• "Reed College required a thesis for a Bachelor's degree. Normally a Bachelor's is sort of ..."
• "Right after The Losers I wrote several other, monumentally unpublishable, books, and was beginning to ..."
• "Simply to support myself, because my family was not well-off, I went into working in ..."
• "So I floundered around for a month and finally came up with a plan which ..."
• "So we're early-to-bed, early-to-rise types. There were times when I was the exact opposite. I ..."
• "Spokane is a terribly, terribly boring town. There is nothing to do in Spokane. If ..."
• "Take the all-powerful sorcerer. There is nothing he has to fear. The guy is bullet-proof. ..."
• "That and the fact we were living in Spokane at the time, wher we went ..."
• "The grocery store in The Losers where Raphael works has almost a floor plan for ..."
• "The letter said, 'Your mother and I are a little concerned about your behaviour. You ..."
• "The more susceptible reader can go ahead and concentrate as hard as they want and ..."
• "The postal service contributed greatly to my career as a fantasy author by losing that ..."
• "The thing is that Poppa was such a giant in the 60s that he seems ..."
• "The unfortunate thing about working for yourself is that you have the worst boss in ..."
• "Then a couple of years ago he started writing again and I sent him another ..."
• "Then I began thinking about the people who lived in those places and wrote in ..."
• "Then they give her a caseload of 40 or 50 people over whom she has ..."
• "There is no way these booksellers will accept them in that format.' Then he made ..."
• "They got my back up about that and I told them to take their job ..."
• "They'd been so decent about the whole thing that after I finally got my Bachelor ..."
• "This guy was expelled from the Church of Scientology, if you can believe that, largely ..."
• "This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was ..."
• "This man identified himself as 'the Son of God.' You'll be happy to know that ..."
• "We checked it out and found that Nevada has th lowest tax rate in the ..."
• "We concluded that if people's general belief was that things were going to go okay, ..."
• "We got into a long discussion comparing the climate of the world at any time ..."
• "We left Denver and moved to Spokane, where I was born, incidentally. I always wondered ..."
• "Weeks went by when I didn't see the inside of my eyelids. But, hey, I ..."
• "What he wrote made me a little bit nervous. This is when Ronald Reagan was ..."
• "What I was doing was generating preliminary studies for what became the Belgariad and Malloreon ..."
• "When I was perhaps 17 I started writing but dabbling in fantasy never really occurred ..."
• "When they ran out of cadre men they gave me my very own platoon and ..."
• "Why the down on social workers? Experience. I developed an antipathy for them while I ..."
• "You can have a character say, 'Gee, they bounced one of my cheques' in contemporary ..."
• "You have to invent the theology, sociology and everything else by dropping three or four ..."