Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Brooks

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

...[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.

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.

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.

We should not be less than what we are.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What you write chooses you.

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's what we have to sustain us in our endeavors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

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.

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.

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.

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

Who would you be but who you are?

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.

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

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present

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?

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.