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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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