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I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs. And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

Charles de Lint

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Charles de Lint
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 22
Musician
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Samuel M. Key
Like
Wouldn
Probably
Terminator
Books
Dwarfs
Write
Meets
Book
Journalists
Writing
Describing
Really
Journalist
Things
Seven

More quotes by 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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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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That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
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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[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one.
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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Tattoos...are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
Charles de Lint
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Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are
Charles de Lint
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Even, she thought, even without the gift of witchsight, there was more beauty to be found in the world than could ever be snared in language or music. And with the sight.
Charles de Lint
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I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?
Charles de Lint
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The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics.
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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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
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The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.
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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What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.
Charles de Lint
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Thing is, while I know better, I like sounding ignorant. Talk like this and people figure you're about as dumb as a fencepost, which suits me fine. Makes it all that much easier to take advantage of 'em.
Charles de Lint
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When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.
Charles de Lint
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If you don't believe that the world has a heart, then you won't hear it beating, you won't think it's alive and you won't consider what you're doing to it.
Charles de Lint
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There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
Charles de Lint