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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

Image
My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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
Image
Silence creates it's own violence.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
My singing ability is zilch.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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
Image
But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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
Image
There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
Image
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