Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Brooks

There is a quiet audacity in Brooks framing craft as “use,” not “talent.” The line sidesteps the romantic myth of the novelist as a lightning rod for genius and replaces it with something more workmanlike: language and imagery are tools you can learn to handle with less waste. That’s a telling stance from a writer whose career has unfolded in public, across decades of genre expectations, fan scrutiny, and the commercial pressures that come with being a pillar of modern fantasy.

The intent reads as both modest and self-asserting. “I think” softens the claim, but it also signals an author measuring himself against his earlier pages, not against rivals or awards. The subtext: early success doesn’t mean early mastery. In fantasy especially, imagery is the currency; readers aren’t just buying plot, they’re buying a world they can feel. By admitting growth in “language and imagery,” Brooks implicitly concedes that beginnings can be blunt, overly familiar, or borrowed from the genre’s inherited palette. Better “use” suggests greater precision: fewer stock epithets, cleaner metaphors, more confident rhythm, a sharper sense of what to leave unsaid.

Context matters: Brooks emerged when Tolkien’s shadow was both shelter and ceiling. To keep writing within that tradition without becoming its ventriloquist, a fantasy author has to evolve at the level of sentence and scene, not just lore. The quote is craft talk, but it’s also a survival strategy: longevity depends on revising your relationship to words, because readers can tolerate recycled tropes longer than they’ll tolerate recycled prose.