Peter Straub Quotes

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing.

My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.

An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.

Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.

On gym days, I don't get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

Wolf! Right here and now!

Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

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

You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.

I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.

Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

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.

...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.

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.

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.

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

Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.