Canadian writer (1951- )
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Journal Entries", Memory and Dream
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
Life's like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.
CHARLES DE LINT
"The Pochade Box", The Ivory and the Horn
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Journal Entries", Memory and Dream
Compromise is necessary ... so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night", The Ivory and the Horn
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Music and Myth: A Conversation with Charles de Lint", The Internet Review of Science Fiction
There's never an easy route to the things that matter.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
You just have to pay attention. If you don't, you'll miss them, or see something else--something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Faerie voices become just the wind, a bodach ... scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The trouble with advice is that it's usually something you don't want to hear.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
CHARLES DE LINT
"The Pochade Box", The Ivory and the Horn
What we take from the spirit world is only a reflection of what lies inside ourselves.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Waifs and Strays", The Ivory and the Horn
It's the questions we ask, the journey we take to get to where we are going that is more important than the actual answer.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Paperjack", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories -- perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years -- and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
I guess there must be some good foster parents, but I never saw any. All mine ever wanted was to collect their checks and treat me like I was a piece of shit unless my case worker was coming by for a visit. Then I got moved up from the mattress in the basement to one of their kids' rooms.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.
CHARLES DE LINT
Moonlight & Vines
I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.
CHARLES DE LINT
Green Man Review, October 2006
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008