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Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

born 1964 Ireland

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (born 26 May 1964) is an Irish-born American author, paleontologist, and prolific blogger perhaps most famous for the novels The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.

Ireland
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Science fiction authors

Random Caitlín R. Kiernan quote

40 quotes

Art is not science. Even when art is about science, it is still art. There cannot be consensus, in the sense that science strives for meaningful consensus.

I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me.

Now I cannot help but dissect. I try not to, but I do anyway.

What people ought to be asking me is "Where do you get those tiny, little infinitesimally faint sparks that you then somehow manage to blow up into ideas?" Of course, my answer would be, "I have no inkling whatsoever."

I could go the rest of my life and never again hear anyone whine about someone else being "emo," and it would be a Very Good Thing.

No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence.

I've seen so goddamn much — I've seen so much that there's no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can't be anything left that's more terrible than what has come before.

Houses Under the Sea (2007)

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.

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.

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.

I sincerely hope I'm not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I'm not an idiot.

Houses Under the Sea (2007)

All I have to do is make you see this. This one particular thing here. That's all. And sometimes it's impossible. Sometimes, I know the best odds I can hope for are a thousand to one.

At some point, I stopped and made the following note to myself: I have never finished a story. I'm beginning to see that now. I don't think that there's ever a point where a story or novel is just exactly right.

I've never written a story that wasn't self-indulgent. Neither has any other fantasy or sf author. We indulge our interests, our obsessions, and assume that someone out there will feel as passionately about X as we do.

The divine is always abominable.

Houses Under the Sea (2007)

I cannot force it. I have never been able to force it. Like I've said before, writing is a wild magic (at least it is for me). It comes when it's ready, and then, if I'm lucky, I have some small say in where it goes and what it does.

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.

Houses Under the Sea (2007)

On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day.

Sometimes, I think that the most alien thing to mankind is mankind itself. The real aliens live next door or across the border or somewhere overseas. Each man and woman defines the world about them, creating a set of those things which they consider "normal" and "good" and "evil" and "sympathetic" and "likable," and these are damned indomitable walls. They are high and thick, and it is the task of the writer to penetrate or scale them. To break in. To shatter preconceptions. To force people to rethink cherished opinions and prejudices.

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.

Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (2003)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Caitlín R. Kiernan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.