Dean Koontz

I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.

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.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

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

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned.

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

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.

You're spooky, he said, You knew what I was thinking. That's not spooky, she said, That's married.

The worst happens when you least expect it.

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.

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.

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.

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations.

Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.

Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself.

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

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

When new hopes fail, old hopes return in the endless cycle of desperation.

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

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

My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle.

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

Home is the first refuge from – and last defense against – the disappointments and the terrors of life.

Lifes mysterious strange and full of wonders and only a fool withdraws from it willingly and lets it pass him by.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

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

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace stanching fear before it bleeds you numb a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

Humanity is a parade of fools and I am at the front of it twirling a baton.

The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes cant even hear crickets chirping.

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.

Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.

Its a rare thing to know one completly to the core and stil love him.

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 beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.

In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.

Petting scratching and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

Alliteration seems to offend people.

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.

Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried.

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

In the end its all about perseverance.

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.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

Being known by everyone is not the same as being loved.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life's too short for that. I don't really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.

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

Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library's worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence - I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.

Lies hurt people imagination makes life more fun.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

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

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world they must go through my heart leaving me scarred and sore.

None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.

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.

The snow did not even whisper its way to earth, but seemed to salt the night with silence.

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.

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

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

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

Once you have had a wonderful dog a life without one is a life diminished.

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.

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.

Life ... is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. Its about perseverance about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.

In this world only the paranoid survive.

Being alone can be good. Its easy to find peace alone. But sometimes being alone is a king of death.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

Houses are not haunted. We are haunted and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.

Chaos half loosed cannot be long controlled it is all or nothing.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.

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

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Intuition is seeing with the soul.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

Whatever happens here trust your heart. Its as true as any compass.

Where there is cake there is hope. And there is always cake.

Never, never try to scope the market.

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

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

I believe that I was a dog in a past life. That's the only thing that would explain why I like to snack on Purina Dog Chow.

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

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared it grows.