Quotes from Terry Brooks

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

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

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

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

And memories, he knew, were not glass treasures to be kept locked within a box. They were bright ribbons to be hung in the wind.

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.

Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.

What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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