Latest Jeff VanderMeer Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Running, World, Logic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think I got a complete picture of what the lives of scientists are like. My father is of the opinion that if scientists are allowed to follow their nose, eventually it results in something. Unfortunately that doesn't always happen. What I came out of it with, in a non-cynical way, was that the scientific process is as messy as anything else. There's nothing wrong with that. That's just the way it is.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Father, Thinking, Opinion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I find myself in this bizarre position in which everything I write and talk about is pretty much about this issue, the environment. It feels a little too comfortable, because at the end of the day I can rationalize that I'm doing my share. I don't know if I actually am, I don't know if I should be more of an activist than I am. But at the end of the day, everybody needs to do those things that they're most likely to continue doing, and that aren't going to burn them out.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Writing, Environment, Bizarre

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It should be totally fine to question the objectivity of scientists and the power structures in scientific institutions. The physical laws of the universe are objective, but human beings in any context are not. That includes with regard to science. To some extent, the supposed objectivity of science has given a lot of extra cover to very subjective and eccentric approaches to exploring aspects of ourselves and the universe around us.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Scientist, Extras, Exploring

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I don't believe that climate-change fiction will change the mind of a denier because most of the deniers I've met are basically in a cult situation. It's a faith issue. It's not a rational issue. There's no fact that's going to change their mind. They simply believe in the cult of climate-change denial and it somehow feeds into the rest of the mythos of their own life story.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Believe, Mind, Denial

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I have received emails from readers who have said that they were emotionally impacted by the books, and they feel they are more environmentally aware and energized to do more. So that's hopeful to me. It is at least evidence of what I'm trying to do - trying to convey very intense emotional experiences by being very close in on character points of view to make you feel it in your body. That's one way to get the point across, by evoking a visceral response.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Book, Character, Emotional

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Thinking, Long, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Philosophy, Mean, Comfort

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The one thing I always come back to as a writer, what I consider my bedrock, is a lot of charged images that appear in the text.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Bedrock, One Thing

  Source: www.avclub.com

• I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Mean, Interesting, Mind

  Source: www.avclub.com

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

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Mother, Art, Strong

  Source: www.avclub.com

• What I envy about musicians is, they have this more direct relationship with the audience. They don't have to go through words. Sure, the lyrics count, but they go more immediately into your brain. There's so much more work you have to put in as a writer - not just with the actual book, but how it's packaged and everything.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Book, Envy, Brain

  Source: www.avclub.com

• My singing ability is zilch.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Singing, Ability

  Source: www.avclub.com

• If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Marine, Biologist, Knows

  Source: www.avclub.com

• One thing about beginning writers is that they don't really always know their own strengths and weaknesses - you might think you're bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you're having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Character, Thinking, Issues

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Writing, Important, Different

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• Across all of the universe of creative lying, whether you believe in the art of it or the entertainment of it, or both, a certain foundation in the basics allows you to kind of jump out into the unknown.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Art, Lying, Believe

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• 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.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Zines, Bookstores, Stuff

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Reading, Past, Influence

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• 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.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Mean, World, Mysterious

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• 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.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Believe, Writing, Creative

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• 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

  Stars, Path, Fantasy

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

• When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Thinking, Smartphones, Dumb

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

• Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.

  Jeff VanderMeer

  Important, Fiction, Might

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com