Jeff VanderMeer Quotes

I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.

I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task.

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.

If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.

I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.

One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.

An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.

The world is a mysterious place and the very limitation of our senses in exploring it means we are sometimes aware of there being something beyond our ken.

I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.

Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.

I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or "convulsive" beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.

History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.

The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.

My singing ability is zilch.

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

Silence creates it's own violence.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?

I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.

The one thing I always come back to as a writer, what I consider my bedrock, is a lot of charged images that appear in the text.

If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.

Even a dream as inspiration doesn't mean anything unless you then find that it's sparked an actual story with a plot.