50+ Peter Straub Quotes On Friendship, Education And Mysterious

Peter Straub is an American writer of horror, suspense, and fantasy fiction. He is the author of numerous best-selling novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, and The Throat. He is also the co-author of the classic horror novel The Talisman, written with Stephen King. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Straub on friendship, love, life.

Top 10 Peter Straub Quotes

1. I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.
2. Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
3. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.
4. If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.
5. 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.
6. An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.
7. I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.
8. I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
• Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.
• Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?
• Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.
• Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.
• I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
• Wolf! Right here and now!
• The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
• You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.
• Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.

Peter Straub Quotes About Novels

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

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

I wish I could go back and re-write my first novel for the first time. Because I really didn't know what I was doing, and although it was published, it is, after all this time, kind of an embarrassment. — Peter Straub

Peter Straub Quotes About Writing

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. The ordinary world of work is closed to him - and that if he's lucky! — 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

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

Peter Straub Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it. — 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

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

I wish I'd known at the beginning that all I really had to do is trust myself. Everything would work out as if by magic once I actually leaned back into my imagination and just let it work, and not question it and not fret about it. — Peter Straub

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

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

You cannot overestimate the role of intuition in fiction writing. Or the role of accident or randomness. These things are very central. This is never really admitted. You have to cover the pages. You have to have those people do things. And the things they do have to be relevant to the entire concern. The specific things they do don't much matter, you just have to have them do something that counts. — 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

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

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

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

Each new book is a tremendous challenge. — 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

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

I was once told by a very well-respected editor, "Category horror is about good vs. evil, that's all it is." And I thought, "That's why it's no good. That's why I find that stuff unreadable." One is looking for something that's a little more emotionally complex and nuanced. — Peter Straub

Life Lessons by Peter Straub

1. Peter Straub's work emphasizes the importance of being open to the unknown and embracing the power of imagination.
2. His stories often explore the depths of the human psyche, emphasizing the importance of understanding the complexities of the human experience.
3. His work also emphasizes the power of storytelling, showing how stories can be used to explore difficult topics and inspire change.