"Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious!"

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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 ..."
• "Another bit of bad timing as far as my position on the bestseller lists was ..."
• "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 ..."
• "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 ..."