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Caitlín R. Kiernan quotes
A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
I pondered exactly how future biographers would go about writing the biographies of authors without letters. It's not like email and "chat" and whatnot will fill the void. Online journals help a little, but they are not, generally, the truly honest sorts of things that letters were, and only a few authors keep them. I tried for years to keep up letter writing, but was defeated in the end by too many unreliable correspondents.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Give me enough words, enough attendant gravity, and I might fall into myself forever, crushed infinitely flat by my own hubris. It'd be a neat trick, I admit. I'd pay to see it - but from a safe distance, of course.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The divine is always abominable.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
And speaking of Massachusetts, I just heard on CNN that the first human cloning has been successfully performed there. I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of cloning humans (or anything else), but I have to question the need for any technology that produces more of us. Making babies is about the only thing for which our species seems to display a more or less universal talent. We hardly need any help.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
We are indeed living at the end of the Golden Age of Mankind, or at least the end of this particular human civilization. That almost everything we take for granted today may, only a couple of decades farther along, seem entirely remarkable, that our most mundane artefacts and toys will stand as incredible examples of luxury and excess. That all of this will pass away, and the "simplest" bits of our day-to-day lives will become miracles of a half-remembered past. A past which will be responsible for that future-present misery. It is difficult to force myself through the trivial routine of my days when these thoughts are front and center. It is difficult to see beyond the veil they draw up about me and difficult to push it all aside long enough to write my silly little stories.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Bad writing days are days when you mean to write and can't, or are interrupted so frequently that nothing gets done.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Yes, I'm sure it makes people more money, and money is nice, but it has very little to do with telling good and true and useful stories.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
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