Peter Straub Quotes

Wolf! Right here and now!

— 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

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

— 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

“Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.”

— Peter Straub

“The mind was a trap
it was a cage that slammed down over you.”

— Peter Straub

“The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.”

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— Peter Straub

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

— 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

“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

“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

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

— Peter Straub

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

— Peter Straub

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

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

— Peter Straub

“I had a connoisseur's ... appreciation of fear.”

— 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

“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

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

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

“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

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

— 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

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

“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

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

— Peter Straub

“A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else,”

— Peter Straub

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

— Peter Straub

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?

— Peter Straub