Terry Brooks Quotes

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.

The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining but also never lose sight of what's going on in the real world.

I want to be a part of stories.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

No matter what's happening in my life, I can always get lost in the romances of my characters.

Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

You live vicariously through your characters.

If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.