Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg.

I want to build vast machines of light and darkness, intricate mechanisms within mechanisms, a progression of gears and cogs and pistons each working to its own end as well as that of the Greater Device. That's what I see in my head. But, too often, I sense that many readers want nothing more complex or challenging than wind-up toys. It's dispiriting.

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.

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.

If there must be resolution and explanation, it must be something worth its weight in mystery. Most times, I'd be content with the mystery.

Sempre fui mulher, Imp. Os hormônios e a cirurgia não me modificaram de uma coisa para outra. Por isso odeio a expressão 'troca de sexo'. Ela é enganosa. Ninguém nunca trocou meu sexo. Eles simplesmente deixaram a carne mais em linha com a minha mente.

He caught a lucky break, got a tip from a CI, a schizophrenic who’s spent the last two decades creating a concordance for the Weekly World News, “the World’s Only Reliable News,” painstakingly cataloging and correlating everything from Jersey Devil sightings to Bat Boy, from Israeli mermaids to the discovery of an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

They have pie,” he tells her as she settles into the seat across from him. “Lemon meringue. And blueberry, too. Welcome to Winslow.

You love someone. You don’t leave her to drown. And you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is!

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.

Basically, I wish I could read the way I used to read. I did not dissect as I read. I simply became immersed in the story and let it sweep me happily along. Now I cannot help but dissect. I try not to, but I do anyway. I cannot help but see "flaws" and all the ways I think I could have done this better. I would suspect that all writers are like this, to one degree or another. Writers are the gods of their universes, and we are never at a loss to suggest how some other god might better run herhisits universe/s. At least, this is true of me. It is one reason I read so much less fiction than I did fifteen years ago. And, actually, stage magic is not a bad metaphor for this problem I now have as a reader. I am precisely like a magician watching another magician's act. I should be suckered in with the rest of the crowd. I passionately desire to have the wool pulled over my eyes. Only it very rarely happens, as I'm too busy figuring out how it's all being done and how I could improve upon it … I just can't help but read it as a novelist. This is, from my perspective, unfortunate. I don't want to know how the trick works. I want to be amazed. I want to be convinced of the magic. But this is what I do. I spend my days gluing words together to try and fool other people. And I can't help but try to see how other writers, especially writers who have found more commercial success than have I, make it work. Sadly, I don't even find the mechanics & theory of fiction writing remotely interesting, which makes this doubly frustrating. It's just a reflex.

"The horse is dead," she says and squeezes Soldier's hand. "From here we walk."
"Anyone ever told you you're sort of a creepy kid?" Odd Willie asks.
"All the damn time," Emmie tells him. "I don't bother keeping count anymore."

"It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over.
"Houses Under The Sea

En ocasiones, las personas hechizadas llegan a un punto en el que, o bien logran ahuyentar a los fantasmas, o los fantasmas los destruyen. Lo que empeora más esto, incluso, es el hecho de que normalmente no funciona el intentar sacar a rastras a los fantasmas y confinarlos en un lugar donde ya no puedan dañarnos. Creo que, por lo general, sólo los propagamos cuando intentamos hacer eso. Se puede hacer una copia, o transmitir una parte infinitesimal del fantasma, pero la mayor parte se queda enterrada tan profundamente en tu mente que jamás se mueve de allí.

Eventually you’ve got to understand that an answer isn’t the same thing as a solution, and a story is sometimes only an excuse.