Peter Straub Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn. — Peter Straub

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

Adventure is a nameless joy — Peter Straub

Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up. — Peter Straub

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

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

and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. — Peter Straub

Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight. — Peter Straub

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

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

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps. — Peter Straub

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

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

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem? — Peter Straub

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

Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing -- all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain't gonna do that, nope. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mind was a trap
it was a cage that slammed down over you. — Peter Straub

The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. Nothing," uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror. — Peter Straub

Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn't matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it's all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they're Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it - all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you - it's still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that's all. Mallon — Peter Straub

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things.
They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

(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

A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else, — Peter Straub

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it. — Peter Straub

He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism; — Peter Straub

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration. — Peter Straub

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

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

I had a connoisseur's ... appreciation of fear. — Peter Straub

And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life. — Peter Straub

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality. — Peter Straub

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

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

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark. — Peter Straub

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

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

I had this dream in which I was having a cocktail party, and it was in a big room. I was standing at the door saying hello to people, and Jeffrey Dahmer walks up and I say, 'Oh Jeffrey, please go on in, it's right in there.' And then I say to myself, I just put Jeffrey Dahmer in a room with all my friends. — Peter Straub

Each new book is a tremendous challenge. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wolf! Right here and now! — Peter Straub

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