Terry Brooks Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

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.

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

We should not be less than what we are.

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

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

What you write chooses you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

...[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.

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

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.

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.

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