Quotes By Dean Koontz

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Never, never try to scope the market.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.