A: Well, I hope to god, cause if I'm not, I'm a bloody hopeless case. I try to be better. I want each book I write to be better than anything I've done before. I don't always achieve it. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't At one point, obviously I will reach the end of my abilities. That is, I will plateau. That I will have gone as far as I can go. I'll still try. You never can tell You might eak out another tenth of a second, you know.

A: See this world for the first time, so that at the same time as the reader is seeing something for the first time, so are these people from this small town.

A: Well, I don't know that I'm constantly searching for this sense of wonder. I just like stories, you know. I'm trying to tell interesting stories about people who I find interesting. And, well I hope other people find interesting, too. And a sense of wonder well, if it happens it happens.

A: I assume you mean the work of Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons & Dragon type game? Uhm, I really don't know how closely involved I am, to tell you the truth. I told them I want to be , I want to have approval. I want to be involved from the earliest stages and beyond. As near as I can tell, so far that's resulted in me being sent a table of contents. I haven't seen anything else. We'll see what happens, I don't know.

A: Jordan was repeating every question because most of the audience couldn't hear the questions He wants to know on a tone that set people laughing already, then: louder, with a malicious gleam in his eyes. Sander wants to know whether there are questions that I think fans should ask me, and haven't been asking. [more laughter] I am not going to tell you what sort of underwear I'm wearing. [spontanious applause] There are very few questions that fans have not asked me. There are many questions that fans have asked me that I have not answered. There are a number of questions that fans have asked me that have made me blush. There are one or two questions that fans have asked me that have made me require smelling-salt to get out of the room on my feet. No, I am not going to give you more ammunition. You know, this is like the Calvin & Hobs strip. I've just been assaulted with snowballs all the way from the sidewalk, and when I manage to reach the door, a voice calls out to me 'Hey, come out here and help us make some more snowballs!'

A: The actual words are based on many words. I have used Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and for a hint of the familiar, I used a little Gaelic, too. Because fantasy languages always have Gaelic in them. That's just the way it goes. But I made deliberately the grammar and structure complicated. English is supposed to be the most difficult language to learn in the world as a second language. I think that that is pride speaking, but just the same yes, well, 'my language is harder than your language.' I've been told it's true though, but whether it is, I don't know. I'll tell you, there are eight tones in Cantonese. Mandarin isn't too bad, there are only four tones there, but you've got eight tones in Cantonese. And there are others that can get twelve or better in other dialects. You can as well just forget about it, unless you grew up jodling from the cradle.

A: I started to write because I'm crazier than and I still am. [laughter] I knwe at the age of five that I would write one day. One day. I always was a ferocious little monster. That is to say, when I was five years old, my worldview was equivalent to that of the average of a twenty-two or twenty-five year old. I had the life-experience of a five year old, but I had the way of looking at things of a twenty-five year old. and I looked at myself and I thought 'well, I can't be writing.' No, I'll write one day, but for me to be writing now would be ridiculous. I'm a kid. and when I was a teenager, it was the same thing. I hadn't seen anything, I hadn't done anything. Okay, this simply isn't possible anymore. I'll just tell in general what else he said He finally started writing when he was in hospital some years later, realizing that life was too short. And that still is the reason he writes. Life is too short to waste on things he doesn't want to do.

A: He was talking about the ending again, and that nobody knows it except for him. But this time he once again said that not even Harriet knows it. If it wasn't for the fact that others also had heard him say last Wednesday that Harriet did know the ending I'd really be doubting myself now.

A: Jordan explained that the development of something like gunpowder is not as natural as it might seem to us. They had fireworks for a thousand year in China before thinking of using it as a weapon (and then they only threw fireworks over the walls because they'd run out of rocks). Steel was invented time and again with never becoming widely known. Things like that. There's no reason for Randlanders to connect 'wanting to do things Aes Sedai do, but without using the Power' with fireworks. There are currently only a handful of people thinking about possible uses of fireworks as a weapon, and that only because they were around to learn about the damage of a chapterhouse blowing up or something similar. Besides this, Randlanders aren't thinking about making weapons when dealing with fireworks, they're thinking about making money with it, because it's a luxury good. It's just as if caviar could be used as a weapon.

A: Jordan answered something about it only being natural that men will notice such things. If a man sees a woman, the odds are that he'll notice things like her legs, and her mouth and her bosom. And women will notice necklines as well, usually thinking other things like 'could I wear that?'

A: The reason he did New Spring was circumstance. Bob Silverberg called him and asked him to do it. He would have said no, except that he had just the day before finished his notes on Moiraine and Lan meeting each other. Those notes had to be shortened to write the story, though. If he'd written New Spring using everything from those notes, it would have been 90.000 words, rather than the 35.000 it's now. (And the idea was: if you get to more than 25.000 words, call Bob immediately!) He's not planning on writing other short stories, but things might just happen in such a way that he will anyway.

A: Read And Find Out.

A: I do not regularly spend time visiting websites, though. When I sit down at my desk, I'm looking at my computer. When I'm looking at my computer, I think of what I can do with the computer, how I can best use it, and the answer to all these questions comes back: write! So, I have visited some, but it's not a regular thing.

A: There is nothing in my books that I can point to and say 'that happened to me,' but everything I write is talking about who I am. And who I am is a creation of all the things that have happened to me in my life. So you could say that everything I write was first shaped by my life's experiences. It's a rather tenuous connection, but that's the only one I can find for you, sorry.

A: No. And if I had she would lie to me. A woman is as likely to tell the truth about that as men are to tell them, and if you think about how many of that you would tell anyone on god's green earth about that. And if you come upon that teaspoon of liquified truth you would tell, know that that is five times the truth that she would tell you. No, what I do is, I eavesdrop. [laughter] One time when he was younger and eavesdropping on women, he received Veritas. He knew everything there was to know about women. And it turned his hair completely white, and beyond, so that most of it is dark again, except for that piece in his beard there, plus it also erased all knowledge he had gained straight from his head. [In other words, more and more he was really getting in a funny-story-telling mood. Maybe Jordan should have become a stand-up comedian. I don't know how much of the humor I manage to bring across, I can imagine it's very little, but if you were there you would have laughed at every other remark, just like the rest of us.] Once in all his books, he went to Harriet saying 'Okay, in this particular situation, this is how I think this woman would react, this is how I think she would feel. Do you believe it? And she said 'yes, I do.'

A: No. I have no favorite genre to read, nor have I ever. I read any book that I think is good, in almost any genre. I mean I don't read romance novels. Simply the fact that a book is supposed to be a good book, is enough for me to consider reading it. And maybe if I decide it isn't a good book, it is not worth reading it. I'll try anything; fiction, non-fiction.

A: Uhm, I don't think it caused me to become an author. I must say I prefer writer. I write, I don't `author`. I think that they're synchronous things. Or perhaps, both `indicative` of the same thing about me. I didn't become a writer because I read early, any more than I read early because I was going to become a writer. I am the kind of person who would become a writer and that kind of person is, I think, perhaps someone who reads early, who gathers inspiration for books.

A: I knew that I was going to write, one day. From the age of five, I knew this. But, when I was very young - five, ten - I was precautious enough, or advanced enough in my thinking, to believe that it was ridiculous, to think of a five, of a six year old, or a ten year old, writing. And I was very conscious of my dignity at that age. In my teens, I've said I haven't lived enough, haven't experienced enough. Anything that I will write will just be empty and useless. So I didn't write. And what actually got me started was in my late twenties when I was injured. I spent a month in the hospital. I was injured in the fall, was torn away from my family. Complications in the surgery. So I spent a month in the hospital, I nearly died. There were some other factors involved. In part, that simply convinced me that life was too short. I shouldn't wait any longer.

A: I certainly did not expect it. That would go beyond having an ego, becoming an egomaniac. Everybody hopes that what they're writing will be popular. I don't think anybody writes a novel and says "I hope 50 people will read this". That's all they want, just 50 people. You hope that what you write is gonna be popular, but you certainly don't expect it.

A: In many ways, yes, I listen toe very sort of music. Classical, Rock, Jazz, Country, Western, Ethnic music from various countries I do not write to Jazz, or Rock. I like all country western, I like to listen to it, or blues, but I can't write to it. I write, or at least maybe I can write to some Jazz, I mainly write to classical music, and some jazz. I usually have music playing when I write.