Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.”

— Dean Koontz

402. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

408. “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

409. “You’ve got to remember whatever happens-it’s only life, we all get through it.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

411. “What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?”

— Dean Koontz

412. “Guilt and shame have, until now, kept me silent on this issue. I am old enough, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Yet I’ve been so long marinated in both emotions that they will forever flavor me.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

Featured in: Fun Quotes

414. “I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts.”

— Dean Koontz

415. “There is nothing fatherly about time and what it does to us, either.”

— Dean Koontz

416. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

418. “I believe that I was a dog in a past life. That’s the only thing that would explain why I like to snack on Purina Dog Chow.”

— Dean Koontz

419. “If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.”

— Dean Koontz

420. “Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.”

— Dean Koontz

421. “The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.”

— Dean Koontz

422. “Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.”

— Dean Koontz

423. “Death was everywhere, he was legion, and you couldn’t escape his attention, but in some places he manifested in greater numbers than in others.”

— Dean Koontz

424. “Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not.”

— Dean Koontz

425. “She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king’s palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.”

— Dean Koontz

426. “I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they had warmed me all my life.”

— Dean Koontz

427. “The brain acknowledged the approach of death while the heart stubbornly insisted upon immortality.”

— Dean Koontz

428. “Hope, however, isn’t all that’s needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith...”

— Dean Koontz

429. “Being paid well for something you love to do – it’s a grace.”

— Dean Koontz

430. “Besides, I can’t get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. I’ve got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can – that’s how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.”

— Dean Koontz

431. “A politician’s goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.”

— Dean Koontz

432. “Never waste energy beating yourself up. Other people are always standing in line to do it.”

— Dean Koontz

433. “If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.”

— Dean Koontz

434. “A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.”

— Dean Koontz

435. “Home is where the heart is. No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.”

— Dean Koontz

436. “I knew what love felt like, for I had loved Father and, less powerfully.”

— Dean Koontz

437. “A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse.”

— Dean Koontz

438. “In times as turbulent as these, but also in the seeming humdrum of daily life, which always proved to be more meaningful and consequential in retrospect, each of us needed to rely on people of constant character and truths that were immutable.”

— Dean Koontz

439. “My parents didn’t raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn’t Santa Claus.”

— Dean Koontz

440. “I don’t find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.”

— Dean Koontz

441. “Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.”

— Dean Koontz

442. “The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother’s pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother’s brow.”

— Dean Koontz

443. “I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.”

— Dean Koontz

444. “The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.”

— Dean Koontz

445. “She lived for others, her heart tuned to their anguish and their needs.”

— Dean Koontz

446. “I enjoy the hell out of writing but don’t like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher’s dismay.”

— Dean Koontz

447. “Because people see violence on the movie screen, they’re not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn’t correlate.”

— Dean Koontz

448. “A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness.”

— Dean Koontz

449. “What’s gotten into you today? All evening.”

— Dean Koontz

450. “Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.”

— Dean Koontz