Top 60 Peter Straub Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Wolf! Right here and now!”

— Peter Straub

2. “The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.”

— Peter Straub

3. “Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.”

— Peter Straub

4. “You’ll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.”

— Peter Straub

5. “On gym days, I don’t get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit.”

— Peter Straub

6. “Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.”

— Peter Straub

7. “Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.”

— Peter Straub

8. “These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.”

— Peter Straub

9. “Could you defeat a cloud, a dream, a poem?”

— Peter Straub

10. “Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”

— Peter Straub

11. “In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.”

— Peter Straub

12. “The mind was a trap – it was a cage that slammed down over you.”

— Peter Straub

13. “God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.”

— Peter Straub

14. “You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces.”

— Peter Straub

15. “Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things – I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.”

— Peter Straub

16. “I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.”

— Peter Straub

17. “I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.”

— Peter Straub

18. “Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.”

— Peter Straub

19. “If I planned everything out in advance, I’d expire of boredom.”

— Peter Straub

20. “I had this dream in which I was having a cocktail party, and it was in a big room. I was standing at the door saying hello to people, and Jeffrey Dahmer walks up and I say, ‘Oh Jeffrey, please go on in, it’s right in there.’ And then I say to myself, I just put Jeffrey Dahmer in a room with all my friends.”

— Peter Straub

21. “What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.”

— Peter Straub

22. “The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.”

— Peter Straub

23. “When evil had taken root in this house, it had grown here first.”

— Peter Straub

24. “However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.”

— Peter Straub

25. “Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.”

— Peter Straub

26. “Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.”

— Peter Straub

27. “Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it’s all you can do to stay consistent.”

— Peter Straub

28. “There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.”

— Peter Straub

29. “Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him – and that if he’s lucky!”

— Peter Straub

30. “Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.”

— Peter Straub

31. “The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.”

— Peter Straub

32. “Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.”

— Peter Straub

33. “Every night he comes thudding out of sleep drenched in sweat and staring into the dark. Something huge and scaly is twisting away into nothingness. There you are again, he thinks. There you are, old friend.”

— Peter Straub

34. “The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he’s a phony.”

— Peter Straub

35. “When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call “colorful.” After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it’s just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.”

— Peter Straub

36. “An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.”

— Peter Straub

37. “Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.”

— Peter Straub

38. “David,” I said, “no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.”

— Peter Straub

39. “A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.”

— Peter Straub

40. “I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.”

— Peter Straub

41. “I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.”

— Peter Straub

42. “All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.”

— Peter Straub

43. “Why did God make lonely people? Answer: He was lonely, too.”

— Peter Straub

44. “My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan’s Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.”

— Peter Straub

45. “It’s a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.”

— Peter Straub

46. “There have been times when I reread – or at least leafed through – something because I’d sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.”

— Peter Straub

47. “I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.”

— Peter Straub

48. “Each new book is a tremendous challenge.”

— Peter Straub

49. “And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.”

— Peter Straub

50. “Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible.”

— Peter Straub