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
Style
Modulate
Story
Lush
Stories
Tended
Care
Strip
Take
Prose
Always
Entirely
Toward
Necessary

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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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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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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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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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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I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it
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Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
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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.
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I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.
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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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Silence creates it's own violence.
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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've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.
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If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
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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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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.
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If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
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So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
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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. 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.
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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.
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