Canadian writer (1951- )
The family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into ... people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics.
CHARLES DE LINT
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Moonlight & Vines
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
You can't stand up to the night until you understand what's hiding in its shadows.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
You can take the woman outta the trash, but you can't take the trash out a the woman.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Paperjack", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
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
Tattoos ... are the stories in your heart, written on your skin.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Mystery of Grace
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
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
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