Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.” The.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

3. “You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

4. “Silence creates it’s own violence.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

5. “Trust your imagination. Don’t be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

6. “What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

7. “The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

8. “There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

9. “Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective – even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

10. “But soon enough I banished this nonsense; some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

11. “The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

12. “I have to have music as a soundtrack to writing fiction. I listen to it at other times, too, but it helps me write.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

13. “I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

14. “You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

15. “But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective – even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

16. “Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

17. “Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer’s head. In fiction, you just hope you’re precise enough to convey the intended effect.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

18. “I think I would remember forgetting that.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

19. “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

20. “Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

21. “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

22. “That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

23. “Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing’s quality and your productivity.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

24. “This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

25. “You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

26. “Among all the impossible things he had already witnessed, what were a few more?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

27. “If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

28. “Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

29. “We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

30. “The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

31. “That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

32. “If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

33. “I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

34. “Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

35. “I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they’re very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct. Somehow. In some part of our lives. We drink, or take drugs, or destabilize the happy job.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

36. “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.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

37. “Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don’t even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

38. “My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

39. “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

40. “Renaissance artist Gregorio Comanini, has counseled the equivalent of “Live an ordinary, regular life so you can be irregular and brilliant in your creativity.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

41. “Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

42. “But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

43. “He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

45. “It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

46. “It’s not being hurt that hurts,′ Borne said.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

47. “I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

48. “Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

49. “Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

50. “And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.”

— Jeff VanderMeer