Jeff Vandermeer
Jeff Vandermeer
Jeffrey Scott "Jeff" VanderMeeris an American New York Times Best Selling writer, editor, teacher, and publisher. He has won the Nebula Award, Rhysling Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, the World Fantasy Award three times, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth7 July 1968
CountryUnited States of America
watches burden bigger
Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
serious tasks stills
You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task.
grateful should-have giving
When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.
literature world born
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?
soul fracture crisis
An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.
book passion writing
Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
what-if purpose invisible
But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
dog eye cities
The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.
reading kids writing
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.
mean world mysterious
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.
writing important different
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.
bedrock one-thing
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.
writing fiction helping
I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.
reading past influence
Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.