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As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Charles de Lint

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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Character
Step
Come
Paper
Real
Close
Work
Realize
Notebooks
Really
Easier
Notebook
People
Steps
Fills
Realizing
Removed
Stories
Characters

More quotes by Charles de Lint

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Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.
Charles de Lint
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I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there's no excuse for that. It's not something I'll let happen to me again.
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One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none.
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Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.
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.
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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.
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The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn’t work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength--in our partners as well as in ourselves.
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Well, you know this world isn't perfect.' 'No, you're wrong. This world IS perfect, people just come along and mess it up sometimes.
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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.
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The real problem is, people think life is a ladder, and it's really a wheel.
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The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.
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.
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It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn.
Charles de Lint
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Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.
Charles de Lint
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All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom.
Charles de Lint
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Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of.
Charles de Lint
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Every time we fix something that broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm.
Charles de Lint
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... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was.
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Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.
Charles de Lint
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There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
Charles de Lint