Terry Brooks

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

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.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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