Quotes from Dean Koontz

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.

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

Best thing that can happen to a man is a good woman.

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.

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned.

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.

A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse

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.

The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work.

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

If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.

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

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.

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

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.

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.

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.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

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.

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.