Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice...

Yeah, that’s what I saw. But I learned a long time ago that some stuff I see when I touch these things, some of it can be influence by other people who touched them before me, by what those people believed. If those beliefs are strong enough, Chance, it’s like they can leave impressions behind, the same way that actual events can.

I'm not sure if erotica should be angry and grim and terrifying and bitter, but it works for me. I rode my frustration. I kicked the bitch in the ribs until it spat up what I needed.

Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.

ever you have happened on a grove set close with ancient trees grown beyond the common height, the pleaching of their branches one upon the other screening out sight of the sky, that loftiness of forest and solitude of place and sense of wonder at so dense and undisturbed a shade out in the open, will convince you of the presence of a god.

To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse.

"I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken."

I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface — the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin — there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

No outlines, ever. Well, except for that synopsis my publisher always insists on. But I consider those necessary evils, and when I begin writing I’ve usually forgotten whatever was in them. Hardly ever does a novel of mine turn out bearing any real semblance to those synopses. That’s part of the business of publishing, not a part of the process of writing. But why do I avoid outlines, well that gets back to writing at a sentence level. The story has not occurred until I write it. Only those broad strokes can exist in my mind and possess any inherent validity. “This will be a story set on Mars, and it’s about a woman looking for her lost lover.” That’s the best I can ever hope for, and I’ve learned that, and I don’t try to force anything more detailed.

I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That's the paradox of me.

Bad writing days are days when you mean to write and can't, or are interrupted so frequently that nothing gets done. I'm disheartened at how often I see the blogs of aspiring writers bemoaning how slowly a book or story is coming along. They have somehow gotten it in their heads that writing is a thing done quickly, efficiently, like an assembly line with lots of shiny robotic workers. The truth, of course, is that writing is usually slow, and inefficient, and more like trying to find a cube of brown Jello that someone's carelessly dropped into a pig sty. Five hundred words in a day is good. So is a thousand. Or fifteen hundred. A good writing day is a day when one has written well, and the word counts be damned. Finishing is not the goal. Doing the job well is the goal. And I say that as someone with no means of financial support but her writing, as someone who is woefully underpaid for her writing, and as someone with so many deadlines breathing down her neck that she can no longer tell one breather from the other. Sometimes, I forget this, that daily word counts are irrelevant, that writing is not a race to the finish line. One need only write well if one wishes to be a writer. A day when one does not do her best merely so that more may be written, that's a bad writing day.

Give me enough words, enough attendant gravity, and I might fall into myself forever, crushed infinitely flat by my own hubris. It'd be a neat trick, I admit. I'd pay to see it — but from a safe distance, of course.