Quotes By Dean Koontz

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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