Jeff VanderMeer Quotes

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

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

Silence creates it's own violence.

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

Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing’s quality and your productivity.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?

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.

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

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.

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

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.