Life & Wisdom Quote by Jeff Vandermeer

VanderMeer is confessing to a pleasure and a discipline in the same breath: he likes prose that overgrows the page, but he refuses to let that growth become the point. "Lush" in his mouth isn’t just decorative language; it’s an ecosystem. It implies texture, humidity, density - the sentence as habitat. Yet the second clause is the real flex. He "modulates" and sometimes "strips it down entirely", positioning style as an instrument, not a signature. That’s a subtle rebuke to the brand-name authorial voice we’re trained to crave, the idea that a writer should sound like themselves at all times, loudly.

The intent is practical: craft talk, yes, but also permission. He’s telling readers (and other writers) that maximalism and minimalism are tools, not moral categories. The subtext is about control. Lushness can be indulgence; modulation turns it into strategy. Stripping down "when necessary" hints at an ethic of service to the story: mood, pacing, and clarity outrank flourish.

Context matters because VanderMeer’s career sits at the intersection of literary and genre fiction, where prose style is often treated as either the whole selling point (literary) or an obstacle to plot (genre). His work in weird fiction and eco-horror makes that tension explicit: sometimes you need baroque language to conjure the uncanny; sometimes the terror lands hardest in clean, reportorial lines. The quote is a craft manifesto disguised as humility: artistry is not how much you can write, but how precisely you can choose.