Latest Dean Koontz Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Dogs are one of those things that make you happy and make you wonder.

  Dean Koontz

  Dog, Wonder, Make You Happy

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Interesting, Wake Up, Fiction

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Choices, Made

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, House, Age

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• The biggest advice is being true to what you want to do. Don't worry if other people understand it or don't understand it. If what you're doing has merit, it will find its way.

  Dean Koontz

  People, Worry, Advice

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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?

  Dean Koontz

  Couple, Past, Years

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Attitude, Real, Character

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Winning, Way, Argument

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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

  Dean Koontz

  Advice, Sensible, Publishers

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Numbers, People, Advice

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Thinking, Interesting, Answers

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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

  Dean Koontz

  Educational, Kids, Enjoy

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.

  Dean Koontz

  Dog, Smell, Focus

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance.

  Dean Koontz

  Jesus, Real, Believe

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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

  Dean Koontz

  Giving, Answers, Life Is

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Thinking, Cells, Twenties

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject.

  Dean Koontz

  Ideas, Two, Numbers

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• What popped up more than that was the realization that I made as an adult that the world is this incredibly complex, layered, and mysterious place and if you stop and think about it the human cell is literally more complex than a fleet of 747s.

  Dean Koontz

  Thinking, Cells, Adults

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Editors, Names, Together

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Editors, Pages, Would Be

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Interesting, Starting Over

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  People, Looks, Week

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Real, Book, Creating

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Careers, Self

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• 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.

  Dean Koontz

  Marine, Coral Reefs, Way

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.