Top 196 Quotes & Sayings by Charles de Lint - Page 3

Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you're feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring ... . Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you're interested in, but other things as well.

I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.

Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn.

You wouldn't want any creative process to lose its sense of fun and adventure, but that doesn't mean you can't take it seriously as well.

The thing to remember when you're writing," he said, " is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into--if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.

It is important to know what a person was. But it's more important to know what they are now.

What do they say about meeting a bear in the woods? Oh right, you shouldn't. And to make sure you don't, you should make a lot of noise so that they'll will know where you are and keep their distance because, supposedly, they're as nervous of us as we are of them. Which is all goo, except this bear doesn't seem the least bit nervous. He's giving me a look like I'm Goldilocks, ate his porridge, broke his chair, slept in his bed, and now it's payback time."- Widdershins

What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.

You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.

I hate the thought of her being forced into a box that doesn't fit her. Of having her wings cut off, her sight blinded, her hearing muted, her voice stilled.

Don't start brooding about that, too," she says. "Everybody's got a piece of stranger inside them. It's what lets us surprise ourselves and keeps things interesting." -Lupita

It reminded me of that tongue-in-cheek quick history of art I'd overheard...Used to be people couldn't draw very well, then they could, and now they can't again.

Well, you know this world isn't perfect.' 'No, you're wrong. This world IS perfect, people just come along and mess it up sometimes.

Every time we fix something that broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm.

How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.

All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom.

Let it go on record that any confusion arose simply because we lacked certain commonalities of reference.

Lies were like having a pregnant rabbit. One day you had one, but before you knew it, there were rabbits all over the place.

There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.

I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.

I don't know what's waiting for us when we die--something better, something worse. I only know I'm not ready to find out yet.

Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker.

The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.

Ghosts were just a way that some stupid people dealt with their dull lives.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

People want to know those details. They think it gives them greater insight into a piece of art, but when they approach a painting in such a manner, they are belittling both the artist’s work and their own ability to experience it. Each painting I do says everything I want to say on its subject and in terms of that painting, and not all the trivia in the world concerning my private life will give the viewer more insight into it than what hangs there before their eyes. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, even titling a work is an unnecessary concession.

I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.

I'm pretty much fixated on certain themes. Family, but it's family of choice as much as family of blood. Individuality, yes, but not at the cost of others' happiness. Be true to your friends. Remembering to find some wonder and hope in the world. Basically it boils down to: treat people like you'd like them to treat you, leave the world a little better than it was when you got here, respect others and stand up for those who can't stand up for themselves.

I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there's no excuse for that. It's not something I'll let happen to me again.

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

There isn't a single day I don't do some writing -- if you don't, you won't have a book. When you're self-employed it is very easy to burn away your time instead -- answering e-mails, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. You really must have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Most of what I am writing is living in the back of my head or in my subconscious. I find if I write every day, my subconscious will do the job for me.

"... he had understood, better than anyone ... the beauty that grew out of the simple knowledge that everything, no matter how small or large it might be, was a perfect example of what it was."

Let me give you some advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you.

You walk around with a negative attitude and you're just naturally going to bring trouble and hard times down on yourself.

I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.

Thing is, while I know better, I like sounding ignorant. Talk like this and people figure you're about as dumb as a fencepost, which suits me fine. Makes it all that much easier to take advantage of 'em.

I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.

The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.

The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

It's not something you can prove....I know you hate to hear this, but you either have it, or you don't.

There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

To me there's no difference between writing YA and adult except that in YA I make the book a little shorter and the protagonists are teens. The difference is in the readers.

It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy.

My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

The best change you can make is to hold up a mirror so that people can look into it and change themselves. That's the only way a person can be changed." By looking into yourself," Zia said. "Even if you have to look into a mirror that's outside yourself to do it." "And you know," Maida added. "That mirror can be a story you hear, or just someone else's eyes. Anything that reflects back so you can see yourself in it.

I can’t imagine it now, but I must’ve been innocent at some time in my life. A baby don’t just get itself born bad, do it?

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.

She hoped he was running to his red deer woman, and that when he tapped on the door of her heart, she'd open it wide and let him in.

I always feel that there is a curtain, you know, that if I could just peek behind the curtain I'd see how the world really works. And since I haven't had it I have to write about it instead.

I don't think the world works on merit.

Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music.

The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.

It seems like I always wrote, I just didn't think of it as a career choice. I just liked to tell stories ... to myself, to pen pals (I had a lot of them, all over the world). Of course this was in the days before computers were everywhere, and anyone could access the Web. You had to make an effort keeping up a correspondence, and the arrival of the mail once a day was a big deal. I think if modern technology had been around when I was a kid, I would never have left my bedroom except to take the dogs out for their run three times a day.