Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

413. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Self-identified intellectuals were among the most dangerous people on the planet.”

— Dean Koontz

431. “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

432. “Somebody asked me about the current choice we’re being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it’s like two of the scariest movies I can imagine.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

435. “I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books – bad guys and boogeymen – not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world.”

— Dean Koontz

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

440. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

443. “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

444. “Except for the lack of enormous insects, suffocating humidity, malaria victims groaning in death throes, poisonous vipers as thick as mosquitoes, and rabid jungle cats madly devouring their own feet, you would have sworn you were in the Amazon rainforest.”

— Dean Koontz

445. “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

446. “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

447. “In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.”

— 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. “Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic...”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz