Terry Brooks Quotations

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.

Testing of self is a regular part of our own lives, so it seems natural to make it a part of the lives of my characters, as well, albeit on a much different level.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

I haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.

I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.

I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

One summer we played for a week at being Knights of the Round Table, using broom handles as swords and lances and metal garbage can lids as shields.

I had wanted to do a dark fantasy set in the present in our own world for some time, but I didn't have what I felt was the right vehicle.

It gets out of the waste stream, out of the landfills.

We'll be able to do something with these instead of grind 'em up.

what happens when a world destroys itself and must rebuild.

What is interesting to me is how the characters respond, how they change and grow by facing what often seem overwhelming difficulties.

In Running with the Demon, I wanted to say something about the nature of childhood, and what it's like to grow up in a small town.

If you live in the right county and get the right worker, you're going to win.

They can do 40 a day, and we believe we're going to get up to 80 a day before too long.

But I am the same storyteller as always.

The community, the city that I live in, we're trying to clean the community up, to bring it up, ... We can't tolerate anybody that's going to bring it down so, in my opinion, these guys needed to go.

This is my 25th book over 28 years, and to still be able to write a book and be a best seller again is remarkable. I'm impressed, myself, and very grateful.

It's getting to a point where, I'm just hanging my head. I don't know how to respond to it.

The unicorns were the most recognizable magic the fairies possessed, and they sent them to those worlds where belief in the magic was in danger of falling altogether. After all there has to be some belief in magic- however small- for any world to survive.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

Nothing is lost that we do not first see as lost. Visions born of fear give birth to our failing. Visions born of hope give birth to our success. What is possible lives within us, and it only remains for us to discover it.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.

We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.” He smiled...

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

What kind of world permitted such terrible injustice, where good men were stripped of everything and soulless creatures of malice and hatred survived to glory in their pointless death?

It's better to die in pursuit of your dreams than to live a life without hope.

I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

Might have, could have, may have, should have—the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.

You shouldn't believe everything you hear you're young, not stupid.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

You can either give in to what youre feeling, just say ‘okay, enough is enough’ and be done with it, or you can fight it.

If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can't let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

The Golden Compass is one of the best fantasy / adventure stories that I have read. This is a book no one should miss.

Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don't take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.

I would also argue that there is a good chance that an outline will help you stave off any onslaught of writer's block. Let me advise you right up front that I am not a big believer in writer's block. I think writer's block is God's way of telling you one of two things - that you failed to think your material through sufficiently before you started writing, or that you need a day or two off with your family and friends.

You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.

A cat never discusses his business with humans, not even Princesses. A cat never explains and never apologizes. A cat never alibis. You must accept a cat as it is and for what it is and not expect more than the pleasure of its company.

The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.

If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

THE NAME OF THE WIND marks the debut of a writer we would all do well to watch. Patrick Rothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous.

You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.

Faith, Princess," the Prism Cat repeated. "It is a highly underrated weapon against the dark things in this world.

When she cried, he would say, "there is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

Cats can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without regard to what anyone says or does. Rather like Princesses.

What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in our endevors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

If you are always frightened for yourself you can't act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don't matter all that much.

What you write chooses you.

She has her gown nicely in place tonight, doesn't she? Black velvet and sparkles, not a thread left hanging. Clever girl, this city. Even the sky is her friend.

Who would you be but who you are?

...[Y]ou have an inner strength that makes it possible for you to do things other people couldn't even begin to think of doing.

If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

Friendship doesn't have anything to do with shoring up weakness. It has to do with respect and consideration for those you care about. It has to do with wanting to give something back to those you admire.

We should not be less than what we are.

I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.

Genocide is like a dessert. It is made of the flesh and bones of woman and children, it is sweetened with the blood of the innocent, and it is baked in the ovens of Auschwitz. There were truths to be learnt and there was wisdom to be gained... but there was a price to to be paid as well. You could not brush up against the future and escape unscathed. You could not see into the forbidden and avoid damage to your sight.

Herein lies the heart and soul of the nations. Their right to be free men, Their desire to live in peace, Their courage to seek out truth, Herein lies the Sword of Shannara.