Top 100 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes
#1. I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone. There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He knew how much I hated words like love.
Jeff VanderMeer
#2. Because our minds process information solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category.
Jeff VanderMeer
#3. Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.
Jeff VanderMeer
#4. 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?
Jeff VanderMeer
#5. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#6. Renaissance artist Gregorio Comanini, has counseled the equivalent of Live an ordinary, regular life so you can be irregular and brilliant in your creativity.
Jeff VanderMeer
#7. No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.
Jeff VanderMeer
#8. It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century.
Jeff VanderMeer
#9. Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
Jeff VanderMeer
#10. If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.
Jeff VanderMeer
#11. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.
Jeff VanderMeer
#12. Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore.
Jeff VanderMeer
#13. History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
Jeff VanderMeer
#14. I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.
Jeff VanderMeer
#15. He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.
Jeff VanderMeer
#16. Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?
Jeff VanderMeer
#17. For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.
Jeff VanderMeer
#18. Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here.
Jeff VanderMeer
#19. Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
Jeff VanderMeer
#20. But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?" There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.
Jeff VanderMeer
#21. You're on your own, like you've always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can't go forward anymore.
Jeff VanderMeer
#22. the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants.
Jeff VanderMeer
#23. But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
Jeff VanderMeer
#24. The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest and to be nice to people." Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet, "My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I'm not always nice to people but that's the idea.
Jeff VanderMeer
#25. If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
Jeff VanderMeer
#26. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#27. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#29. That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly.
Jeff VanderMeer
#32. I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
Jeff VanderMeer
#33. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#35. 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?
Jeff VanderMeer
#36. In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.
Jeff VanderMeer
#37. Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
Jeff VanderMeer
#38. That is why the human race is dying - too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.
Jeff VanderMeer
#39. So many differing opinions and philosophies ... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
Jeff VanderMeer
#40. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#41. My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.
Jeff VanderMeer
#42. Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.
Jeff VanderMeer
#45. I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.
Jeff VanderMeer
#46. And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?
Jeff VanderMeer
#47. I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.
Jeff VanderMeer
#48. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#49. But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.
Jeff VanderMeer
#50. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#51. Agency in fiction has to exist in the context of the worldview. Otherwise agency is not just meaningless or unconvincing, it is often laughable. Unfortunately, agency is often thoughtlessly given to characters who would not have it in reality. p.189
Jeff VanderMeer
#52. He'd said they were studying the "taywah" or "terror" of the region, even when he'd spelled it out as t-e-r-r-o-i-r.
Jeff VanderMeer
#53. The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.
Jeff VanderMeer
#54. You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.
Jeff VanderMeer
#55. There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know.
Jeff VanderMeer
#56. What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequence? *
Jeff VanderMeer
#57. Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.
Jeff VanderMeer
#59. This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn't. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster.
Jeff VanderMeer
#60. Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.
Jeff VanderMeer
#62. I'm not an answer," she said. "I'm a question." She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn't yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.
Jeff VanderMeer
#63. I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
Jeff VanderMeer
#64. My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
Jeff VanderMeer
#65. That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
Jeff VanderMeer
#66. That was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers' stubble.
Jeff VanderMeer
#67. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#68. The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.
Jeff VanderMeer
#69. This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don't follow. I'm well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.
Jeff VanderMeer
#70. Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell... p.195
Jeff VanderMeer
#71. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#72. Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.
Jeff VanderMeer
#73. If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
Jeff VanderMeer
#74. Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else's till.
Jeff VanderMeer
#75. Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow
Jeff VanderMeer
#76. I aimed my flashlight at the ground - and leapt back, gasping. Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth.
Jeff VanderMeer
#77. You can't trust how I'll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I'm going. I always know where I'm going.
Jeff VanderMeer
#78. I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
Jeff VanderMeer
#79. Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all.
Jeff VanderMeer
#80. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#81. All musical talent is absent in me, to the point of being unable to play board games that require you to hum a tune while others guess what it is, since all my humming sounds the same. Musical instruments have always seemed like alien artifacts to me, even as I really admire anyone who can play one.
Jeff VanderMeer
#82. You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is.
Jeff VanderMeer
#83. Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you've seen it it's got you!
Jeff VanderMeer
#84. There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
Jeff VanderMeer
#85. The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.
Jeff VanderMeer
#86. Even a dream as inspiration doesn't mean anything unless you then find that it's sparked an actual story with a plot.
Jeff VanderMeer
#88. I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
Jeff VanderMeer
#89. You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#91. A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised, him replying, I don't have an opinion on that.
Jeff VanderMeer
#92. Don't thank people for giving you what you should already have
Jeff VanderMeer
#93. There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone - scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#94. I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.
Jeff VanderMeer
#95. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#96. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn't want the fearful unknown of a 'pristine wilderness.' They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either.
Jeff VanderMeer
#97. Cultural indigestion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit.
Jeff VanderMeer
#98. There's nothing to this world,' he said, 'but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.
Jeff VanderMeer
#99. He drank deeply from his orange juice - really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment.
Jeff VanderMeer
#100. you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.
Jeff VanderMeer
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