Canadian writer (1951- )
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
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Locus Magazine, June 2003
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
Into the Green
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
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
The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn't work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength--in our partners as well as in ourselves.
CHARLES DE LINT
Memory and Dream
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
I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Magic's never what you expect it to be, but it's often what you need.
CHARLES DE LINT
Moonlight and Vines
As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
I write on a computer, but I've run the complete gambit. When I was very young, I wrote with a ballpoint pen in school notebooks. Then I got pretentious and started writing with a dip pen on parchment (I wrote at least a novel-length poem that way). Moved on to a fountain pen. Then a typewriter, then an electric self-correct. Then someone gave me a word processor and I was amazed at being able to fit ten pages on one of those floppy discs.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008
I believe a good writer can write a good book with any sort of character, in any sort of setting, but I prefer to write about the outsider. It might just be because I've been one (or perceived myself to be one) for so much of my life. But the simple fact of being marginalized immediately brings conflict to a story before the narrative even begins, and that's gold for a writer because it means that your character already has depth before events begin to unfold.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale.
CHARLES DE LINT
Yarrow: An Autumn Tale
There's more to life than just surviving ... but ... sometimes just surviving is all you get.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
I'd say that any character or setting can be given a bit of an otherworldly sheen and be the better for it. The one thing I insist on with my own writing is that I won't let magic solve my characters' real world problems. The solutions have to come from the characters themselves.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview, Fairy Room, February 27, 2013
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
A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.
CHARLES DE LINT
Greenmantle
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Romano Drom", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection