It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.
Dean KoontzThe answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss.
Dean KoontzNarcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility. Each of us is a potential source of foolishness, each of us must endure the consequences of the foolishness of others, and in addition to all of that, Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are. - Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 62 chapter 8
Dean KoontzEvil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most relentless force of all, which is time.
Dean KoontzBeing polite is not only the right way to respond to people but also the easiest. Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no reason to promote more confrontations.
Dean KoontzOn those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.
Dean KoontzDare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?
Dean KoontzIf we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.
Dean KoontzReaders 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.
Dean KoontzBooks had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal.
Dean KoontzNo degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.
Dean KoontzSome 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.
Dean KoontzSome argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.
Dean KoontzI'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've always trusted it. Trust me now. There's a reason I am the way I am, and there's a reason I was born to you. There's always a reason. We belong together.
Dean KoontzDoubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that's good and true.
Dean KoontzWhen I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.
Dean KoontzI have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.
Dean KoontzA long walk and grooming with a well-mannered dog is a Zen experience that leaves you refreshed and in a creative frame of mind.
Dean KoontzAlthough the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.
Dean KoontzOr maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.
Dean KoontzYou can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.
Dean KoontzIf Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap
Dean KoontzIf I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative.
Dean KoontzBunny 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.
Dean KoontzEvery writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.
Dean KoontzThen what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.
Dean KoontzThat is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.
Dean KoontzWe yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
Dean Koontz