Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.

I’m a big believer in big books, and that doesn’t necessarily mean long books.

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.

We all create stories to protect ourselves.

I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. Probably not even real

I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.

I’m not independently wealthy.

Losing the possibility of something is the exact same thing as losing hope and without hope nothing can survive.

At the heart of any terror is the fear of losing what we find meaningful.

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours.

‘Lord of the Rings’ was a set of books in which the world had been conceived before the characters were placed within that context.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.

‘House of Leaves’ is certainly about the unsettling nature of fear – and it was my aim to address that – but it’s also about recovering from fear.

Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

Even the closest relationships that I have I know could potentially fall away. That’s not to speak pessimistically or negatively about those relationships. In a weird way, it’s the opposite. I value them.

I believe the structure of ‘House of Leaves’ is far more difficult to explain than it is to read. And while I’d like to lay claim to some extraordinary act of originality, truth is I’m only taking advantage of capabilities inherent in everyone.