Peter Straub Quotes

42 quotes in 770 categories

• 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…
• I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.
• 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.…
• Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.
• 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…
• I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.
• God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.
• 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…
• I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
• 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…
• Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.
• Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
• I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
• However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.
• I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
• If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.
• 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…
• 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…
• Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.
• The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

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