Top 81 Peter Straub Quotes

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

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #7675
#2. What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #47933
#3. Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #82040
#4. I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #130795
#5. I had a connoisseur's ... appreciation of fear.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #201344
#6. 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?

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #204187
#7. But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand,' Sears said. 'I don't know if I do or do not,' I said. 'Like most people.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #209892
#8. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #231111
#9. A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #233840
#10. Adventure is a nameless joy

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #260156
#11. Wolf! Right here and now!

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #266582
#12. Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #267969
#13. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #269326
#14. David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #382540
#15. Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #408975
#16. Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #436391
#17. There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #449323
#18. The mind was a trap
it was a cage that slammed down over you.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #516552
#19. (Another writer once asked me why I wrote about "nebbishes." I told him I wanted to write about "the common man.") Sometimes I even

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #528514
#20. As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #531636
#21. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #535950
#22. It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #593861
#23. If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #633028
#24. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #645790
#25. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #681511
#26. To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.
A piece of the universe?
A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #682617
#27. Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #718756
#28. and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #727279
#29. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #774381
#30. 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

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #792534
#31. A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else,

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #835553
#32. Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #856287
#33. Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #870094
#34. I'm being haunted," she blurted out.
"My dear," he cooed. "Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #886430
#35. The materials of genre - specifically the paired genres of horror and the fantastic - in no way require the constrictions of formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods and concerns of its wider context, general literature.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #913985
#36. I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #960874
#37. She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #970944
#38. He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1010133
#39. I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1029934
#40. Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1042222
#41. Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1047551
#42. Everything here is a lie," Rose said. "Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened." Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1049590
#43. I liked the place I came from.
But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1052565
#44. The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1088284
#45. I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1114768
#46. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1203610
#47. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1204211
#48. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1223432
#49. In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1230547
#50. An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1275233
#51. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1279229
#52. Whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1311469
#53. The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1317126
#54. God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1330275
#55. In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1334330
#56. 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 ...

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1337440
#57. The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1369245
#58. However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1408706
#59. It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1410456
#60. Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1415425
#61. He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism;

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1418909
#62. It didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1423575
#63. Every night he comes thudding out of sleep drenched in sweat and staring into the dark. Something huge and scaly is twisting away into nothingness. There you are again, he thinks. There you are, old friend.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1439616
#64. These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1444458
#65. 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")

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1463029
#66. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1469945
#67. Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1477807
#68. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1497303
#69. 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

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1603173
#70. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1616615
#71. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1621082
#72. Occasionally..what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1625777
#73. She thought, instead, with longing of more books - of buying books - of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1633708
#74. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1683105
#75. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1691466
#76. 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.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1726931
#77. Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1743990
#78. Dick Dart emerged from the ether during a flight from New York with my wife and children to Puerto Rico.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1754130
#79. You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1761493
#80. What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1865178
#81. Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.

Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes #1868080

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