Second we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

Since fantasy isn't about technology the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

We all rely on technology to communicate to survive to do our banking to shop to get informed but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer.

When I was about 13 or 14 I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.

After this I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

My father was a writer and an acting teacher.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal because if you lose it then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel I try and fill up notepads.

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those you're being deprived of something.

Success comes to a writer as a rule so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Writers as they gain success feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.