Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

Featured in: Fun Quotes

411. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

413. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

429. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

431. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

445. “It is the purpose for which we exist. This reckless caring.”

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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