Quotes from Raymond E. Feist

The brave man is not the one without fear but the one who does what he must despite being afraid. To succeed, you must be willing to risk total failure; you must learn this.

More men have been defeated by reports than all the steel of all the swords in history.

You would do well to know, Marcus, that irritating a better swordsman than yourself is a good way to end up dead.

In Tsurani culture, forgiveness was simply a less shameful form of weakness than capitulation.

I don't like fantasy where a king snaps his fingers and suddenly a whole army appears and goes off to war - he's got to feed them, he's got to pay them, he's got to take care of the camp followers and the gamblers and the people who cause disorder.

When you talk about fantasy, the usual problem is that whilst you've got the world of imagination, there are no controlling forces.

People like rules, or at least the appearance of rules, even in fantasy.

Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations.

I won't say that writing is therapy, but for me, the act of writing is therapy. The ability to be productive is good for my mental health. It's always better for me to be writing than vegetating on some couch.

I keep threatening to write a non-fantasy book, and they keep offering me the kind of money I can't refuse to write a fantasy. That's a good thing. I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay for my Chargers season tickets.

Often I'll try things that just won't happen the way I'd like them to, so hearing that they're not working saves me some wear and tear the next time around.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

I've never worried about 'the reader' because there isn't one. There are thousands, and they all have strong opinions, from 'Magician' was the best ever,' and I've gone downhill since to 'The new book is the best ever,' so to whom to I listen? So I write for myself and hope other people like it.

But for the most part, love is a recognition, an opportunity to say, 'There is something about you I cherish.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

The first love is the difficult love.

The issue of the Betrayal was so central to that, I felt the need to comment upon it. My choices were to ignore the games and put them 'outside' of continuity or to integrate them. I chose the latter.

There were two things going on: 1) I had already established in my own mind where I wanted to go with the next series, and having James around as a Grey Eminence would have complicated matters. He had had an amazing life and it was time to bid him good-bye.

You can only have one first born child. You may love all your children deeply and with passion, but there is something unique about the first born.

I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.

Also, it's risky to try to duplicate earlier success. Magician had a certain charm to it, mostly due to my choice of lead characters, that I would be hard put to duplicate.

Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers.

Either systems are in balance or they are falling apart. If people are acting in what appears to be a twisted way, I want to know the reason for that.