Vandermeer Quotes & Sayings

Silence creates its own violence. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate. — Jeff VanderMeer

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this. — Jeff VanderMeer

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

surely by now you realize that you can't trust anyone. But why not take a chance?' * — Jeff VanderMeer

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn't do the first thing that came into their heads. — 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

There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics. — Jeff VanderMeer

Control thought of the theories as "slow death by," given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: "Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown." Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — 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

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

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn't care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations
and thus their analogies and metaphors
out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years. — Jeff VanderMeer

A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me. — 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

There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone - scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you. — Jeff VanderMeer

a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body's destruction. — Jeff VanderMeer

That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly. — 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

Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don't you mean witchcraft? Don't you mean the end of civilisation? Don't you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don't know? — Jeff VanderMeer

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn't — Jeff VanderMeer

the trees were putting on their September garments, brown and red and yellow, — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

Hunt game? With pearl-handled revolvers?" I asked, incredulous. "Isn't that a bit ... I dunno ... fancy? Do I just run out into the forest with my pearl-handled revolvers, or do I invite some deer to a cocktail party and then gun them down? — Jeff VanderMeer

[A]nything served in a Chinese restaurant is Kosher, even pork.
from The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals — Duff Goldman

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

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

My singing ability is zilch. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all. — Jeff VanderMeer

I am writing this sitting in the waterlogged lobby of a rotting, half-finished condominium complex. I am surrounded by cavorting freshwater seals and have two pearl-handled revolvers in my lap, a bottle of vodka in my right hand, a human body in the freezer in the kitchens behind me, and a rather large displaced rockhopper penguin staring me in the face. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

It is a curious fact of nature that that which is in plain view is oft best hidden. I — Jeff VanderMeer

If he'd had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago. — Jeff VanderMeer

Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. — Jeff VanderMeer

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors' equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat. — Jeff VanderMeer

He's a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead. — Jeff VanderMeer

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. — Jeff VanderMeer

The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world. — Jeff VanderMeer

That was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers' stubble. — Jeff VanderMeer

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it. — Jeff VanderMeer

He was also, according to his file, "a first-rate scientist partial to beer," the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle. — Jeff VanderMeer

If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy, — 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

So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it. — Jeff VanderMeer

The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman? — Jeff VanderMeer

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

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another - writers who could not have read each other - still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there. — 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

If the world is a just place, that mark — Jeff VanderMeer

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

It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true. — Jeff VanderMeer

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti's work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.) — Jeff VanderMeer

I've got ... ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it — Jeff VanderMeer

In Control's dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He — Jeff VanderMeer

The longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. — Jeff VanderMeer

You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is. — Jeff VanderMeer

If you don't know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart. — 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

If making a doppelganger using the priests' emerald powder, the dulcimer should be played during the mixing; otherwise, your monster may coalesce with a vestigial tale or tail. It is also known that playing the dulcimer after dinner increases the chance of pleasant conversation, if accompanied by wine and a nice dessert. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories. Throughout — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

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

We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

Subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous. — Jeff VanderMeer

What about the world do you most love?
The fact that I'm not here by myself.
-from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine — Margo Lanagan

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

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192 — Jeff VanderMeer

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle. — Jeff VanderMeer

What occurs after revelation and paralysis? — Jeff VanderMeer

He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other. — Jeff VanderMeer