Literary Birthday – 17 October – Robert Jordan

Robert Jordan was born 17 October 1948 and died 16 September 2007.

Quotes

You have to have talent to some extent – I certainly hope I have talent – but you have to have luck as well. Once you get that first shot, that will get you noticed for the rest of your books and that will give the rest of your books a better chance.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
I think that quite often you can only find a choice between bad and worse. But I think it’s worth making the effort, and I like to expose my characters to that sort of situation.
I’m not certain that I draw from any one culture more than others. Many myths and legends of many different cultures are really the same story when you get to the heart of it. They are often cultural cautionary tales about how we should behave and how we should live.

Robert Jordan was an American author of epic fantasy. He wrote The Wheel of Time®, one of the most important and bestselling series in the history of fantasy publishing with over 14 million copies sold in North America alone. He also wrote historical fiction under his pseudonym Reagan O’Neal, a western as Jackson O’Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung.