Top 25 Dean Koontz Quotes

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it’s at the extreme end of their experience.

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.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.

I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we’re in more danger now than before.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

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.

I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence – I find that offensive. I think that’s potentially damaging to society.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I’ve read it.

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.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it’s also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it’s like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

Because people see violence on the movie screen, they’re not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn’t correlate.

In my personal life, I’m a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we’re human beings.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

There’s sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

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.

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

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.

I never discuss a novel while I’m writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

I think it’s perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you’re not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

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

Never, never try to scope the market.