Dean Koontz
When 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.Collection: Real
I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts.Collection: Book
I have a sofa on which I never nap, big windows with an ocean view that I rarely see because I keep the pleated shades down at all times while working. I know I'm a potential slacker, so I don't tempt myself.Collection: Ocean
I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.Collection: Believe
I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things.Collection: Teach
There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.Collection: Book
I've always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it's like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.Collection: Book
I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.Collection: Marine
As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.Collection: People
While I like people, I do also like being alone in a room and seeing what you can do with a particular theme or subject.Collection: Like Being Alone
There are thousands of proteins in the cells, some of them very large chains of molecules. And the cell doesn't function if one of those chains of molecules isn't there, and you start looking at the complexity of life and the mystery of life, and then start thinking about things like the twenty universal constants, that if any one of them from Plank's minimum to the mass of a proton, if one of them is the tiniest bit off, there would be no life or possibility of it in the universe.Collection: Thinking
I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.Collection: Moving
I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.Collection: Writing
Being paid well for something you love to do - it's a grace.Collection: Grace
I imagined a life that turned out to be pretty much exactly like the one I've had. That fascinates me endlessly. I wake up many mornings, and it almost wouldn't surprise me if I woke up from it and it was all a dream.Collection: Dream
I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.Collection: Writing
Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.Collection: Book
I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.Collection: Fall
You 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.Collection: Winning
I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.Collection: Attitude
I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.Collection: Advice
Every 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.Collection: Voice
Most universities are no longer temples of knowledge, but of power, and true moderns worship there.Collection: Power
She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.Collection: Sorry
There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.Collection: Time
When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.Collection: Wrong Things
The only thing we can't buy more of is time." she said. "And dodo birds. We can't buy any more of them. they're extinct. And dinosaurs.Collection: Bird
Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?Collection: Ice
Odd: I wish I could believe in reincarnation. Chief Porter: Not me. Once down the track is enough of a test. Pass me or fail me, Dear Lord, but don't make me go through high school again. Odd: If there's something we want so bad in this life but we can't have it, maybe we could get it the next time around. Chief Porter: Or maybe not getting it, accepting less without bitterness and being grateful for what we have is a part of what we're here to learn.Collection: Believe
Narcissists 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 8Collection: Humility
Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy - well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh. -Odd Thomas -Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 30 chapter 4Collection: Believe
Every talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.Collection: Use
I was looking forward to having a halo. It would make such a convenient reading lamp.Collection: Reading
Perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.Collection: Encouraging
It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.Collection: Needs
Duty doesn't need to call; it only needs to whisper. And if you heed the call, no matter what happens, you have no need for regret." Odd ThomasCollection: Regret
They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.Collection: Jobs
But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
Y'all take care of yourself now... strange and interesting friends are hard to find.Collection: Interesting
It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.Collection: Soul
But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.Collection: Responsibility
But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.Collection: Book
The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.Collection: Hate
She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Light
He said, if you allow yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary.Collection: Ordinary
The hatred of truth is the taproot of violence.Collection: Hatred
Sorrow is not a raven perched persistently above a chamber door. Sorrow is a thing with teeth, and while in time it retreats, it comes back at the whisper of it's name.Collection: Doors
In this world only the paranoid survive.Collection: Wise