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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.

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
Almost
Strong
Artist
Sense
Visuals
Mother
Visual
Art
Cover
Book
Choose
Always
Books

More quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

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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.
Jeff VanderMeer
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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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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 believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.
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My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.
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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’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of 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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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.
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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.
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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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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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If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
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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 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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History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
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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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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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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from 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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