Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn't see it, because they had no other choice.

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.

In a sense, fictional dystopias have been a way of distracting us from the truth of our condition by placing it 'over there.'

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

An important reason that we're in the trouble we are in with climate change is that we don't have a handle on our environment. We form public policy based on information that is wrong.

I like North Florida because it's much wilder than the rest of the state.

Trump lays bare a lot of things already wrong with our society. But he also accelerates the process of it becoming worse, when it could be getting better.

Heroes aren't always people who save others in the normal sense. Sometimes they're people who keep trying even when things seem impossible.

I'm not a fan of fiction that's totally hopeless.

I'm a huge fan of science fiction, horror, and fantasy films.

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.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you.

My mom was a biological illustrator for a time before computers replaced that job.

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.

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.

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

My stepmom is one of the leading researchers on lupus in the world.

Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That didn't mean he was cruel; there's no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun of it. Similarly, 'Black Mirror' likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn't mean the show is cynical enough to endorse them.

I'm an agnostic trending toward atheist and resist, in particular, Christian interpretations and imagery.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

I'm fairly skeptical of movements, organizations, and institutions in general.