Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be.

So, here are my windows, stained all with me.

I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks no one is watching.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

That’s another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.

I was thinking, earlier, how there's this stigma attached to "writing for money" and how odd that is, as though writing is akin to sex (another "creative" act?) and writing for money is akin to prostitution in the minds of so many people. Whoring with adjectives, so to speak. Do I give good prose? Look up the definition of "hack." So, there must be the perception that writing, like the priesthood, comes with some higher purpose in tow. Getting paid well somehow sullies the purer cause. I've heard writers dismiss something or another that they've written by explaining, "Oh, yes, I know that sucked, but I only wrote it because they paid me so much money." And then we might even forgive them a piece of crap, because we have a sensible explanation. That wasn't a real orgasm. I was only faking the plot. Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner in Hollywood.

In imposing order, it’s easy to miss the obvious.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

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.

Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap.

Dead people, dead ideas and supposedly dead moments are never really dead and they shape every moment of our lives. We ignore them and this makes them powerful.

Yesterday was an utter waste. An artist, of whatever stripe, has only so many days, to write or paint or dance or whatever, and each one wasted is that much that will never be accomplished.

Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.

Y me cantó durante días y días, noches y noches, convirtiéndome en el recipiente de los recuerdos de un fantasma.

Wanting to be drunk, needing to stay sober.