Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

404. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

407. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

409. “Of course, I don’t know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t know anything.”

— Dean Koontz

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— 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. “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

429. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

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

— Dean Koontz

442. “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

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

— Dean Koontz

444. “I’d guess that what’s behind you is much more than what lies ahead, though you have a way to go yet.”

— Dean Koontz

445. “Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.”

— Dean Koontz

446. “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

447. “Ed, once called Aladdin, is the first artificial intelligence I’ve ever known. Maybe if Harry can kill Hiskott and if then I live long enough to see the world become the total science-fiction theme park it seems to be headed toward, I’ll probably know dozens of them one day. Let me tell you, if they’re all as nice as Ed has turned out to be, that’s okay with me.”

— Dean Koontz

448. “I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.”

— Dean Koontz

449. “One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he’s the only studio head I have ever known who will change his mind and say he was wrong.”

— Dean Koontz

450. “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