Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.”

— Dean Koontz

352. “What we do as a society is seek simple answers.”

— Dean Koontz

353. “She’d been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.”

— Dean Koontz

354. “Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.”

— Dean Koontz

355. “I’ve a long list of things I don’t know how I’ve done, but I’ve done them. In the end, it’s always about perseverance.”

— Dean Koontz

356. “The given world dazzles with wonder, poetry, and purpose. The man-made world, on the other hand, is a perverse realm of ego and envy, where power-mad cynics make false idols of themselves and where the meek have no inheritance because they have gladly surrendered it to their idols in return not for lasting glory but for an occasional parade, not for bread but for the promise of bread.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

358. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

360. “Echoing off the tile walls, the sizzle-splash of the falling water sounded like the hissing of serpents and the brittle laughter of strange children.”

— Dean Koontz

361. “Without trust, there can be no tranquil resting of the mind.”

— Dean Koontz

362. “To generations of the willfully blind, true beauty can remain unseen in plain sight, but beauty sooner or later asserts itself – always, always, always – and is at last recognized, because there’s so damn little of it.”

— Dean Koontz

363. “Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

369. “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

370. “But all organic matter must have cell structure,” Sara said. “Cell structure is virtually a definition of organic matter, a requisite of all living tissue, plant or animal.”

— Dean Koontz

371. “Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.”

— Dean Koontz

372. “Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it’s a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.”

— Dean Koontz

373. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

391. “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

392. “We must have our goals, our dreams, and we must strive for them. We are not gods, however; we do not have the power to shape every aspect of the future. And the road the world makes for us is one that teaches humility if we are willing to learn.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

394. “In nightmares, we can’t look into our own eyes except by indirection, perhaps because we fear discovering that therein lie the worst monsters plaguing us.”

— Dean Koontz

395. “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

396. “What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred.”

— Dean Koontz

397. “It’s only life. We all get through it.”

— Dean Koontz

398. “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

399. “I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.”

— Dean Koontz

400. “She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.”

— Dean Koontz