Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one.”

— Dean Koontz

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “The less depth a belief system has, the greater the fervency with which its adherents embrace it. The most vociferous, the most fanatical are those whose cobbled faith is founded on the shakiest grounds.”

— Dean Koontz

356. “Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.”

— Dean Koontz

357. “I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.”

— Dean Koontz

358. “I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

360. “Even if God exists, does He know that you do?”

— Dean Koontz

361. “Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can’t eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.”

— Dean Koontz

362. “Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.”

— Dean Koontz

363. “He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.”

— Dean Koontz

364. “What doesn’t quicken dies. That’s an indisputable truth of life.”

— Dean Koontz

365. “This isn’t a stupid horror movie, odd one. It’s never too late to do the intelligent thing.”

— Dean Koontz

366. “This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.”

— Dean Koontz

367. “To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.”

— Dean Koontz

368. “The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.”

— Dean Koontz

369. “My wife is my first audience. She’s a tough lady, so I can’t say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.”

— Dean Koontz

370. “We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.”

— Dean Koontz

371. “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

372. “I have a sofa on which I never nap, big windows with an ocean view that I rarely see because I keep the pleated shades down at all times while working. I know I’m a potential slacker, so I don’t tempt myself.”

— Dean Koontz

373. “The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.”

— Dean Koontz

374. “I took comfort that its IQ, while no doubt high enough to allow it to run for elective office, seemed to be only a fraction of mine.”

— Dean Koontz

375. “Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it.”

— Dean Koontz

376. “Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.”

— Dean Koontz

377. “Some days I’m lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.”

— Dean Koontz

378. “I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.”

— Dean Koontz

379. “We are fallen in a broken world, and one thing that occurs to me is that after thousands of years, when we think of fallen angels, we think of them as we always have: busy spreading misery on Earth. But the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.”

— Dean Koontz

380. “This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.”

— Dean Koontz

381. “I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself refreshed in a toaster oven for 23 minutes once every month.”

— Dean Koontz

382. “In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it’s at the extreme end of their experience.”

— Dean Koontz

383. “I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence – I find that offensive. I think that’s potentially damaging to society.”

— Dean Koontz

384. “If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you’re not proud of, use a pen-name for that.”

— Dean Koontz

385. “The hatred of truth is the taproot of violence.”

— Dean Koontz

386. “To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl. Any.”

— Dean Koontz

387. “Any town can die without actually drying up and blowing away. It can be as dead as a ghost town even with people still living in it.” Gazing.”

— Dean Koontz

388. “Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.”

— Dean Koontz

389. “Not an insult sweetie. That was a thirteen word kiss.”

— Dean Koontz

390. “Loving the ideal more than the reality is the cause of all the misery the human species creates for itself.”

— Dean Koontz

391. “Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin-but in this world a long fall will always end in a hard impact.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

393. “That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we’re old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we’ll lose everyone we love. We’re never the same. But somehow we’re all right. We go on.”

— Dean Koontz

394. “You have a messiah complex, got to save the world.”

— Dean Koontz

395. “My only armor is my belief that life has meaning and that, when my last sun has set and my last moon has risen, when the dawn comes that marks the moment when I am born with the dead, there will be mercy.”

— Dean Koontz

396. “Nearly everything that was fun, of course, was also a little dangerous: riding roller coasters, skydiving, gambling, sex.”

— Dean Koontz

397. “Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.”

— Dean Koontz

398. “Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.”

— Dean Koontz

399. “These days, people spent too much time striving to understand their feelings – and then ended up with none that were genuine.”

— Dean Koontz

400. “Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.”

— Dean Koontz