Raymond E. Feist

But first of all, you got to know Shakespeare.

You don't have to be an expert.

You just got to be familiar because for one thing, I think he's the best writer in the history of the human race.

It's 400 years after he's dead and we're still paying money to see his stuff.

Not a lot of writers from the late 16th and early 17th century that were still paying bucks to go see their stuff.

And then the Greeks, the Russians, Jane Austen and Mark Twain and all of the traditional storytellers.

In terms of fantasy, you can go back to the Eddas and all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Through the Greeks...

And all that.

Modern fantasy, more or less, you're talking about Lord Dunsinane.

And then the man who is responsible for what we look at now as fantasy, Tolkien.

Now, Tolkien was an Oxford don, like my father, who was taught by 19th century scholars.

And he was a linguist.

He tried to build Lord of the Rings on the basis of language.

You know, and there's a whole bunch of stuff about that.

But the point is, he was influential as heck.

And in the 60s, when I discovered Tolkien, he just started that wave of popularity in college.

He was my generation's Harry Potter, you know, J.K.

Rowling's Harry Potter stuff.

Because Lord of the Rings was the only books that like jocks would talk to nerds about at lunch in college.