Terry Brooks quotes

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Fall #Magic #World

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Might #Muse

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Believe #Thinking #Lucky

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Choices #Chance #Results

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

#Canvas #Fantasy #Enough

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Cutting #Weather #Drawing

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

#Writing #Heart #Too Much

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

#Fire #Use #Temper

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Stress #Book #Hands

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

#Attitude #Princess #Cat

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

#Travel #Hurt #Anger

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Identity #Who We Are #Where We Come

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Real #Way #Firsts

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Purpose #Matter #Frightened

What you write chooses you.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Girl #Clever #Sky

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Letting Go #Sight #Done

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Fighting #Giving #Feelings

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

#Writing #Thinking #Magic

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Creating #Use #Shame

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

#May #Might #Possibility

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

#Book #Mind #Made

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Real #Wind #Names

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Florida #Connections

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Home #Thinking

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?
-- Terry Brooks

#Life #Men #Hatred

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

#Character #Four #Want

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Book #Writing #Simple

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

#Writing #Way #Suspense

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Looks #Fiction

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Important #Needs

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Real #Other Worlds #Want

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

#Country #Thinking #Imagination

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Princess #Cat #Apologizing

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.
-- Terry Brooks

#What Matters #Imagination #Matter

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

#Imagination #Want #Kicks

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

#Thinking #Use #Language

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

#Add #Might #Grows

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

#Book #Big Book #Bigs

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Winter #Boys #Bobcats

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Balance #Different

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Writing #Opportunity #Conflict

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Grateful #Writing #Hands

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Block #Writing #Thinking

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

#Book #Adventure #Missing

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Giving #Care #Weakness

If I have the means, I have the responsibility to employ them.
-- Terry Brooks

#Mean #Responsibility

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

#Stupid #Believe #Young

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...
-- Terry Brooks

#Fire #One Day #Events

...[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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Thinking #People #Inner Strength

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Struggle #Thinking #Identity

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

#Princess #Cat #Dark

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Inspirational #Feelings #Important

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.
-- Terry Brooks

#Evil

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Giving #Vision #Firsts

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

Who would you be but who you are?
-- Terry Brooks

#Individualism #Who You Are

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Magic #Fabric #Want

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

#Writing #Want #Storytelling

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

#Book #Thinking #Next

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Done #Shifting #Mazes

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

#Dream #Pursuit #Without Hope

We should not be less than what we are.
-- Terry Brooks

#Should

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

#Years #Different #Thirty

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#New York #Book #Firsts

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

#Opportunity #Magic #World

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

#World #Attractive

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Character #Self #Levels

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

#Kids #Imagination #Entertainment

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

#Book #Breathing #Imagine

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

#Fake People #Trying #Tests

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Children #Blood #Sight

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Adventure #Names #Stories

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.
-- Terry Brooks

#Play #Games #Deception

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Lying #Heart #Men

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Thinking #Dust #Incomplete

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.
-- Terry Brooks

#Inspirational #Growing Up #Teenager