If I'm not mistaken, wasn't he searching for somebody to finish the books
FOR HIM?
Somebody that he liked the writing style of, etc, of course in the event that he himself could not finish them for the aforementioned reasons.
E: For those of you new to the series, he's averaged 3 years inbetween each book release, and has been getting slower and slower about it. I only picked the series up recently, I had finished the entire thing when the show was announced, but I was still amazed to find out that he started writing them in
1991.