Quote

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

Jeff VanderMeer

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Jeff VanderMeer
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: July 7
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Bellefonte
Pennsylvania
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer
Story
Lush
Stories
Tended
Care
Strip
Take
Prose
Always
Entirely
Toward
Necessary
Style
Modulate

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.
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Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
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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.
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My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
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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?
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Once you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
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There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
Jeff VanderMeer
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What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
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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.
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Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.
Jeff VanderMeer
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A lot of the creature comforts and the things we take for granted, are not sustainable, especially at current population levels. And so, it's not just simply a matter of changing over to solar. It's a matter of changing our philosophies. Of learning to live, more or less, mid- or post-apocalyptic, whatever apocalyptic means.
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History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
Jeff VanderMeer
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You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
Jeff VanderMeer
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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.
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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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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.
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