Top 515 Quotes & Sayings by Dean Koontz - Page 9

I've had good publishers and bad publishers, and you've got to learn when the advice is sensible and when it's not.

We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.

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.

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.

The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.

There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

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.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

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.

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.

Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

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.

I think the world is an interesting place and I don't think anybody has the firm and final answer to what it is but I kind of assume there's a purpose.

I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.

I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.

There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things.

Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

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.

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.

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.

Being paid well for something you love to do - it's a grace.

I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.

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.

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.

I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.

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.