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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

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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
Even
Flight
Kafka
Like
Fantasy
Flights
Star
Angela
Writers
Carter
Personal
Firmly
Path
Paths
Create
Grounded
Stars
North
Nabokov

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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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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.
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I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.
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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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Silence creates it's own violence.
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My singing ability is zilch.
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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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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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I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
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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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But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
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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.
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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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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 had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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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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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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So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
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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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