Dean Koontz
And the funny thing was if you made the best of it, if you smiled through every storm, the bad things were never as terrible as you expected them to be, and the good things were better than anything you could have wished for yourself.Collection: Funny Things
Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.Collection: Doe
Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.Collection: Dog
The biggest advice is being true to what you want to do. Don't worry if other people understand it or don't understand it. If what you're doing has merit, it will find its way.Collection: People
I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.Collection: Self
I'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.Collection: Differences
What most people find important, you do not. This is Wisdom. To what you believe is important, you are ready to give your mind, heart, and soul. This is Grace.Collection: Wisdom
One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.Collection: People
On the Road that I have taken, one day walking I awaken, amazed to see where I've come, where I'm going, where I'm from.Collection: Life
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.Collection: Life
Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions.Collection: Anxiety
The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.Collection: Stars
... one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.Collection: Book
Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.Collection: White
The wives of Spartans are the secret pillars of the world."--Odd ThomasCollection: Wife
Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent," said Dusty. "But the word isn't accurately descriptive of a person." Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, "Oh, really, not accurately descriptive? Be careful housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?Collection: Orange
If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.Collection: Laughing
Evil men often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognise the truth and mistake deseption for it.Collection: Mistake
Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.Collection: Fate
Good fences make good neighbors, and these were apparently good enough that they had not felt the need for razor wire at the top. I crested the fence, threw myself into the yard beyond, fell, rolled to my feet, and ran with the expectation of being garroted by a taut clothesline. I heard panting, looked down, and saw a gold retriever running at my side, ears flapping. The dog glanced up at me tongue rolling, grinning, as though jazzed by the prospect of an unscheduled play session.Collection: Running
I'll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.' We don't have pigeons.' Then I'll feed the pterodactyls.Collection: Parks
There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.Collection: Literature
here in the summer desert, winter found my bloodCollection: Summer
Don't tell me what's necessary, you presumptupus pup. What's necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might be.Collection: Wish
We wasn't born to be all the time scared, we was born happy.Collection: Scared
Whiskers of the cat, Webbed toes on my swimming dog; God is in the details.Collection: Dog
I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning...as does death.Collection: Doe
The rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.Collection: Rain
The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.Collection: Angel
No degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.Collection: Power
Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.Collection: Loyalty
I've a long list of things I don't know how I've done, but I've done them. In the end, it's always about perseverance.Collection: Perseverance
Only time conquers time and its burdens.Collection: Time
I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.Collection: Wise
One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance.Collection: Jesus
There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.Collection: Editors
If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.Collection: Writing
I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.Collection: Lunch
I think the world is an interesting place and I don't think anybody has the firm and final answer to what it is but I kind of assume there's a purpose.Collection: Thinking
I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.Collection: Giving
I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.Collection: Educational
I 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.Collection: Numbers
I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.Collection: Book
We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.Collection: Book
The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.Collection: Interesting
Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?Collection: Couple
I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.Collection: Editors