"I wrote two science fiction novels, three fantasy novels, and a children's book. And then everything stopped. I had not expected that it would. I don't know if one ever does. I had, in fact, started another book, and got to, say, page 70 – and just hit a wall. I couldn't continue. And I didn't know why not..."

"I tried to figure out what to fill the hole in my life with. And what I filled it with was the rest of my life. I went back to martial arts very strongly. I had friends – I didn't lose them. I didn't stop reading books. And discovered that I could live and be a happy person, and never write again."

"I went and worked for five dollars an hour, selling Thai and Balinese objets d'art to rich people in Berkeley, in a shop run by a friend of mine. And I enjoyed it! ... I took the H&R Block course, and then went off on my own and started doing taxes for people."

"Six or seven years ago, something changed, and I wrote two short stories, out of nowhere. Ellen Datlow published them. I didn't know at the time why I was able to do it. And I didn't count on it ever happening again. It made me very happy to do it, mind you. About six months after that, I was at an extended period of zen sitting, and said to my teacher something to the effect that I had written two short stories and it made me happy. He said, 'Oh, that's wonderful!' Because he had been aware of the change. And he said – clever man – 'And what will you do if it goes away again?' I said, purely spontaneously, 'It doesn't matter, sensei; I don't care.' And I realized that I didn't. And it went away again, for another five years!"

"In June of 1995, I started writing again. A story came flying out of the air at me. I had no faith in it, no belief that I was going to be doing it past the moment. But I sat down and wrote, and right in the middle, I had to go away for a week and tend to an extremely intense martial arts event. I went back, plunged in, wrote about 30,000 words – and threw them all away! ... 'Then I started actually writing the book. In previous books, I'd pretty much write chronologically, though every once in a while there'd be a scene I couldn't write, and I knew I would have to just wait and go back for it. But that didn't happen with very many scenes. This was less so. This book has a prolog and a first chapter, neither of which got written until probably halfway through it. The name of the book is Dragon's Winter."

"The central character of this book is a man whose most fundamental ability, the thing he thinks of as most basic to his nature, is stolen from him. Isn't that interesting? And will you believe me when I say that I didn't know that was going to happen, and I didn't realize the connection until about a third of the way through? I got up one day and said, 'My god! What am I doing?' And then I sat and laughed. Well yes, you write about what you know – and I am!"

"Ace has bought the earlier science fiction and fantasy novels, and will reprint them. I'd like to see the fantasy novels back in print, though I probably will do better not to read them. And I have a certain sentimental connection to A Different Light, mostly because it gave its name to a bookstore that's now a chain."