Jeff VanderMeer Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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 -
“A dream inspiring a story is different than placing a description of a dream in a story. When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way, and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest. If you're writing something fantastical, it can be a really deadly choice because your story already has elements that can seem dreamlike.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration - no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparking inspiration.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“One thing about beginning writers is that they don't really always know their own strengths and weaknesses - you might think you're bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you're having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“Across all of the universe of creative lying, whether you believe in the art of it or the entertainment of it, or both, a certain foundation in the basics allows you to kind of jump out into the unknown.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“What I envy about musicians is, they have this more direct relationship with the audience. They don't have to go through words. Sure, the lyrics count, but they go more immediately into your brain. There's so much more work you have to put in as a writer - not just with the actual book, but how it's packaged and everything.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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 -
“If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task.”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then I'm energized but not so awake that the critical voice clicks on, the voice that sometimes says, "Don't write that," or "Man, that sentence is terrible - you should give up and go pet the cats."”
-- Jeff VanderMeer -
“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 -
“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
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