Peter Straub Quotes

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

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

I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy. ~ Dan Chaon

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

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

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

I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

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

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration. ~ 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

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

It struck me that his innate elegance, the product of his character & bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

Each new book is a tremendous challenge. ~ Peter Straub

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

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

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

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary. ~ 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

I've been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back - I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction. ~ Rachel Caine

The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight. ~ 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

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

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

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

My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf. ~ Michael Easton

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

Adventure is a nameless joy ~ Peter Straub

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

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

Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things - I'm telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe. ~ Peter Straub

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through. ~ 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

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. ~ Donald Harington

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

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

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

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

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate. ~ 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 didn't have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened. ~ Peter Straub

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

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time. ~ 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

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

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

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad. ~ Peter Straub

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

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

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

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

The opposite of love is evil.

You stupid human beings, the whole thing is right in front of you, but on you go, debating whether evil is internal or external, inherent in everyone or created by circumstance...The world is not divided into two. You have evil within you, you contain evil, that's the basic idea. When you open the door, what do you get, the lady or the tiger? Whoops, sorry, you get both, because the lady is the tiger.

Doity Toid to the Eel ~ Peter Straub

Knowledge is more durable if it's deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory. ~ Peter C. Brown

It is a strange story, the story of Jesus. To the Jews, it is not the story of Israel's redemption but some odd detour. For Christians, though, the story of Jesus is the final chapter of the story of Israel. For Christians, all that Israel hopes for - redemption from enemies, forgiveness of sins, triumph and exaltation, a restoration of Eden, the conversion of the nations, the earth filled with the glory of Israel's God - all of it comes to pass through Jesus. Not through the sword of Zealots, or the rigid purity of the Pharisees, or the political compromises of the Sadducees, or the withdrawal of the Essenes. Israel's story is carried to its conclusion by a different sort of Jew entirely, a different sort of holiness, a different story-line, a story-line of compassion, service, suffering, death. And, over all and transforming all, resurrection. For Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed. ~ Peter J. Leithart

We had this unbelievable faith that no business has done, quite frankly, and we tripped along the way doing it, but within two years, we were in 40-plus countries. So we ran at an amazing pace, and this is where venture capitalists play a role. Making Groupon into what it is today, we had no role in it; the entrepreneurs did it. ~ Peter Barris

This is a revolution, damnit! We're going to have to offend somebody! ~ Peter Stone

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget. ~ Peter Davison

Here is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer. ~ Peter Drucker

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised. ~ Peter Weir

I want to stay away from politics, or else I'll probably end up putting my size fifteen foot into my mouth. ~ Peter Steele

I don't know what to say to that, but I have to agree with Johnny that, yeah, we do touch upon things that most men would rather not admit: That we feel pain, we cry, get sad and sometimes don't deal well with disappointment. ~ Peter Steele

After being rationed to a single ball, a whole box of them gave me a delightful feeling of sudden wealth. French politicians must have a similar sensation when elected to high office and permitted to dip into the chateaux and limousines and government-issue caviar. No wonder they cling to power long after they should be tucked away in an old folks' home. I'd do the same. ~ Peter Mayle

Certainly the Australians were buried in Korea. But I think that from Vietnam on, all the killed were brought home to America or to Australia, in our case. ~ Peter Scott

The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome. ~ Peter L. Bernstein

The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment. ~ Peter J. Carroll

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement. ~ Peter Agre

When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children's birthdays, there's a good chance you've become too wrapped up in your work. ~ Peter Lynch

Learning cannot be disassociated from action. ~ Peter Senge

In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears. In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails. ~ Peter M. Senge

Leadership is an achievement of trust. ~ Peter Drucker

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse. ~ Peter Greenaway

If you're going to have the tortured soul of an artist, then you might as well create some art while you're at it. ~ Leila Sales

It is by doubting that we come to investigate, and by investigating that we recognize the truth. ~ Peter Abelard

That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she's miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn't want to be seen. ~ Emma Straub

Look at every situation as if you were in the future and you were looking back on it. ~ Peter Schoomaker

The word church as applied to the Christian society was first used by Jesus Himself when He told Peter, "Upon this rock I will build my church" [Matthew 16:18]. He is the foundation of all Christian experience. ~ Billy Graham

There is ample evidence that confirmation bias permeates throughout investors' decisions. For example, once an investor likes a stock, he is likely to seek out information that validates that stock. In a 2010 study, researchers showed that investors used message boards to seek out information that validated rather than challenged, stocks they owned (Park et al. 2010). If we own a stock, we tend to look for anything that validates our decision to buy it, and to reinforce why we should keep holding it. ~ Peter Mallouk

In the same decades that saw the rise of mass incarceration, the number of beds available in state mental hospitals across the country dropped from 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015. There are now ten times as many mentally ill people in our prisons and jails as there are in state mental institutions. ~ Peter Edelman