Quotes from Peter Straub

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of oral painting could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. (A Short Guide To The City)

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

And then a prince will come along and say the magic words and three ravens will give you the magic tokens and a fish will carry you on his back

A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else

I'm being haunted, she blurted out. My dear, he cooed. Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission.

The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. "Oh, you'll get your heart broken," he says. "Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.

He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism;

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.

You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces

What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.

It struck me that his innate elegance, the product of his character & bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it.

Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very seriously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

Nice days, terrible nights.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

it didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened.

I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?