Peter Straub Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

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

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.