Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can’t make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.”

— Dean Koontz

302. “My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty.”

— Dean Koontz

303. “Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings...”

— Dean Koontz

304. “Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.”

— Dean Koontz

305. “There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people’s free will when they decided to do the Devil’s work. People are doing the Devil’s work everywhere you go; there’s no avoiding it unless you go live on a mountaintop somewhere, a hundred miles from everyone.”

— Dean Koontz

306. “People couldn’t bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.”

— Dean Koontz

307. “In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph.”

— Dean Koontz

308. “No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself.”

— Dean Koontz

309. “To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.”

— Dean Koontz

310. “Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.”

— Dean Koontz

311. “Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I’m always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven’t always been happy about that.”

— Dean Koontz

312. “The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn’t matter. The universe is anthropic, meaning that its design makes possible and sustains intelligent life, especially human beings. Nevertheless, I perceive some power, some presence, some adversary behind the scenes that by countless devices subtle or blunt seeks to destroy us.”

— Dean Koontz

313. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.”

— Dean Koontz

314. “Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”

— Dean Koontz

315. “No, if there’s any ultimate redemption, it would be because I passed though your life without scarring you, and did not diminish who you are.”

— Dean Koontz

316. “I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.”

— Dean Koontz

317. “The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.”

— Dean Koontz

318. “Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.”

— Dean Koontz

319. “To a predator, fear indicates weakness.”

— Dean Koontz

320. “You can’t fix things with a hug, but you can’t make them any worse either.”

— Dean Koontz

321. “I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.”

— Dean Koontz

322. “We are born with the dead: See, they return and bring us with them.” – T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.”

— Dean Koontz

323. “I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder – that gets watered or it doesn’t.”

— Dean Koontz

324. “Every human face is more enigmatic than the timeworn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt.”

— Dean Koontz

325. “The best weapons against evil were hope, optimism, determination, and faith.”

— Dean Koontz

326. “Furies, Alecto. In classic mythology, Tisiphone and Megaera and Alecto, daughters of the earth goddess Gaea, punished crimes in the name of the victims.”

— Dean Koontz

327. “I think the world is an interesting place and I don’t think anybody has the firm and final answer to what it is but I kind of assume there’s a purpose.”

— Dean Koontz

328. “Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.”

— Dean Koontz

329. “In a crunch a man’s reputation never counts for as much as it ought to.”

— Dean Koontz

330. “The rain wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.”

— Dean Koontz

331. “I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.”

— Dean Koontz

332. “The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination’s loom.”

— Dean Koontz

333. “I can’t go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it. That might mean I will rewrite and rewrite page one 20, 30, 50, 100 times.”

— Dean Koontz

334. “Are you prepared for the first wound?”

— Dean Koontz

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335. “All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although, in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them are the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.”

— Dean Koontz

336. “Anyone who learns the true and hidden nature of the world will be terrified, Oddie, but there’s a safe harbor past the terror.”

— Dean Koontz

337. “I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don’t want to be an enabler, sir. I’d rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.”

— Dean Koontz

338. “I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.”

— Dean Koontz

339. “Evil men often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognise the truth and mistake deseption for it.”

— Dean Koontz

340. “Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”

— Dean Koontz

341. “It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.”

— Dean Koontz

342. “I curse the night I let your idiot father squirt you into me.”

— Dean Koontz

343. “The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.”

— Dean Koontz

344. “People have lost their history, the what and how and why of things. They know so little of the places where they live.”

— Dean Koontz

345. “A good dog is one of the best things of all to be.”

— Dean Koontz

346. “Whiskers of the cat, Webbed toes on my swimming dog; God is in the details.”

— Dean Koontz

347. “Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.”

— Dean Koontz

348. “He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.”

— Dean Koontz

349. “These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil.”

— Dean Koontz

350. “I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.”

— Dean Koontz