240 Quotes by Terry Brooks

What you write chooses you.

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.

Evil contained is not evil destroyed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.