Jeff VanderMeer Quotes
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I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or "convulsive" beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.
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I find myself in this bizarre position in which everything I write and talk about is pretty much about this issue, the environment. It feels a little too comfortable, because at the end of the day I can rationalize that I'm doing my share. I don't know if I actually am, I don't know if I should be more of an activist than I am. But at the end of the day, everybody needs to do those things that they're most likely to continue doing, and that aren't going to burn them out.
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Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
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I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
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It should be totally fine to question the objectivity of scientists and the power structures in scientific institutions. The physical laws of the universe are objective, but human beings in any context are not. That includes with regard to science. To some extent, the supposed objectivity of science has given a lot of extra cover to very subjective and eccentric approaches to exploring aspects of ourselves and the universe around us.
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So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
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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.
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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.
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What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
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You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task.
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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.
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I think I got a complete picture of what the lives of scientists are like. My father is of the opinion that if scientists are allowed to follow their nose, eventually it results in something. Unfortunately that doesn't always happen. What I came out of it with, in a non-cynical way, was that the scientific process is as messy as anything else. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just the way it is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.
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Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
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A lot of the creature comforts and the things we take for granted, are not sustainable, especially at current population levels. And so, it's not just simply a matter of changing over to solar. It's a matter of changing our philosophies. Of learning to live, more or less, mid- or post-apocalyptic, whatever apocalyptic means.
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But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
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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.
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My singing ability is zilch.
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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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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.
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I don't believe that climate-change fiction will change the mind of a denier because most of the deniers I've met are basically in a cult situation. It's a faith issue. It's not a rational issue. There's no fact that's going to change their mind. They simply believe in the cult of climate-change denial and it somehow feeds into the rest of the mythos of their own life story.
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