Jeff VanderMeer Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Jeff VanderMeer on Wise Famous Quotes.
Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.
I aimed my flashlight at the ground - and leapt back, gasping. Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth.
Nature practices deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely. When
it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death.
the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants.
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.
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.
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 words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.
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.
A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised, him replying, I don't have an opinion on that.
But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning.
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?
They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.
Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.
I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
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.
his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers.
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.
Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart.
Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.
That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
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.
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.
There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
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.
Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
We live in a universe driven by chance," his father had said once, "but the bullshit artists all want causality.
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.
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.
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.
A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.
I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.
Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn't do the first thing that came into their heads.
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.
When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.
I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.
Even a dream as inspiration doesn't mean anything unless you then find that it's sparked an actual story with a plot.
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.
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.
You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you.