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The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

Charles de Lint

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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Thing
Wakes
Reader
Paper
Whether
True
Truth
Remember
Writing

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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She hoped he was running to his red deer woman, and that when he tapped on the door of her heart, she'd open it wide and let him in.
Charles de Lint
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Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.
Charles de Lint
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Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
Charles de Lint
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We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.
Charles de Lint
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We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.
Charles de Lint
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Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world, the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to, like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.
Charles de Lint
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I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.
Charles de Lint
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Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.
Charles de Lint
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I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.
Charles de Lint
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I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.
Charles de Lint
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I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.
Charles de Lint
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A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.
Charles de Lint
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Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
Charles de Lint
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I'm not as trusting as people think I am. Sure, I see the best in people, but that doesn't mean it's really there.
Charles de Lint
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Stone walls confine a tinker cold iron binds a witch but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.
Charles de Lint
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It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
Charles de Lint
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Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
Charles de Lint
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You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.
Charles de Lint
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In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle.
Charles de Lint
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The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.
Charles de Lint