405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

The story that meant the end arrived late one night.

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books.

The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.

Except, later, I understood Ned better – after he was gone. It wasn’t just escape, all those mysterious details, that amazing mythical salamander. By telling me the giant salamander could be near where we lived, he was changing the landscape around me. He was changing what we dreaded, what stifled him, into something exciting and positive and new.

You don’t know this, ‘cause you’re too young,” came the usual lecture, “but the politicians run all the big scams. Government’s the thief of all time. That’s why it tries so hard to catch thieves – it doesn’t like the competition.

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.

Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don’t use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what’ll happen.