Dean Koontz Quotes (98 Quotes)

I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.

We're not here to leave a mark, bro. Monuments, legacies, marks - that's where we always go wrong. We're here to revel in the world, to soak in the awesomeness of it, to enjoy the ride. The world's maximum perfect as it is, beauty from horizon to horizon. Any mark any of us tries to leave - hell, it's only graffitti. Any mark anyone leaves is no better than vandalism.

I have been reading Stephen King since CARRIE and hope to read him for many years to come.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

Do as little harm to others as you can make any sacrifice for your true friends be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie. Sometimes black humor is the only kind we can summon, but even dark laughter can sustain.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.

Bunny slippers remind me of who I am. You can't get a swelled head if you wear bunny slippers. You can't lose your sense of perspective and start acting like a star or a rich lady if you keep on wearing bunny slippers. Besides, bunny slippers give me confidence because they're so jaunty. They make a statement they say, 'Nothing the world does to me can ever get me so far down that I can't be silly and frivolous.' If I died and found myself in Hell, I could endure the place if I had bunny slippers.

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.

I think it's perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.

I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.

We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy.

There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.

I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself refreshed in a toaster oven for 23 minutes once every month.

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

One of the greatest sorrows of human exisence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others.

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.

I've not seen in my lifetime any politician who is a heroic figure. The manipulation that all politicians use on one level or another is so transparent.

Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

When I was eight I remember writing one about the perfect puppy, ... I guess I always liked dogs, too. I was always fascinated with dogs.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

He always threatened to kill us when I was a child, and I always thought he would do it and I grew up, and he had, ... I mean there's was lots of violence, but it never came to the ultimate thing. And then you developed a certain guilt because you always thought your father was going to try to kill you and he never did and then you feel sort of guilty about it. Well, no matter what he is, no matter all the despicable things he's done, why would I have thought that way about him He is my father.

Morrell, an absolute master of the thriller, plays by his own rules and leaves you dazzled.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror.

He'd gone out to a sporting goods store and he'd bought a long-bladed fish-gutting knife and he had strapped it and when he pulled that knife on me, that was a very close thing because the struggle for the knife spilled over into the hall, ... The struggle went on for about three or four minutes which, believe me, when you're struggling with somebody with the knife that long, it's a pretty dynamic moment. And I got the knife away from him.

Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.

Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie.

I can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it, ... That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times. I build a book the way coral reefs are formed, on all these little dead bodies of marine polyps, you know

I really believe that everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself and to succeed in life.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.

Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life.