Quotes by Terry Brooks

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• My interests are different now than they were thirty years ago.
• 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.
• 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.
• We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.
• Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.
• I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.
• I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.
• When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.
• We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.
• 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.
• I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too.
• 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.
• A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.
• 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.
• Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.
• For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.
• Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.
• 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 haven't made up my mind about doing anymore Landover books.
• 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.
• Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.
• Dare to be different, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of creativity.