Canadian writer (1951- )
All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled.
CHARLES DE LINT
Memory and Dream
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?
CHARLES DE LINT
Svaha
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Pal o' Mine", The Ivory and the Horn
You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The moon likes secrets ... and secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.
CHARLES DE LINT
Dreams Underfoot
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008
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.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
It's good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there's more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Paperjack", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
The only real reason for self-referencing is the fun factor. It's fun for the writer, getting little peeks at what old characters might be up to. And it's fun for readers to spot a familiar face, or pick up on a made-up book title or something from an earlier story. I don't know that it does -- or even should -- contribute to the story in hand being any better than it would have been without it.
CHARLES DE LINT
"A Conversation With Charles de Lint", SFsite, 2000
I was a misfit, but I think most teenagers feel that way. I don't care if you were a popular jock or the kid who spent his lunch hours in a stairwell reading a book, we all seem to have dealt with insecurities of one kind or another throughout our high school years.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.
CHARLES DE LINT
Green Man Review, October 2006
We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we're looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
CHARLES DE LINT
Tapping the Dream Tree
It's one of those inexplicable things. I remember stepping out of the airport the first time we came to Tucson (it must fifteen years or so ago, now) and I just felt like I was home. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I lived in desert country when I was a kid (Turkey, Lebanon, with lots of side trips through the Middle East and Egypt). Maybe it was from reading all those Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey westerns when I was a kid. Maybe it's because it was once a sea and we all came from there originally.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008
I've always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of fairie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look. But I couldn't always find them. And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagination that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl