Dean Koontz Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that’s more than just entertainment-w hich is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.

  Dean Koontz

  Struggle, Writing, People

• But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Writing, Fire

  Dean Koontz (2003). “Lightning”, p.152, Penguin

• Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

  Dean Koontz

  Love, Pain, Writing

• I realized you might make money at writing, and you might even make a living at it. So after that I didn't write stories just for the class but wrote them for the purpose of submitting them somewhere, and at some point in the process, I began writing them just to please myself and that's where you begin to see the real value of a life of writing.

  Dean Koontz

  Real, Writing, Class

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• Authors of so-called 'literary' fiction insist that action, like plot, is vulgar and unworthy of a true artist. Don't pay any attention to misguided advice of that sort. If you do, you will very likely starve trying to live on your writing income. Besides, the only writers who survive the ages are those who understand the need for action in a novel.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Artist, Advice

• Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

  Dean Koontz

  Pain, Writing, Psychics

  Dean Koontz (2007). “Odd Thomas: An Odd Thomas Novel”, p.134, Bantam

• A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Pasta, Garlic

• When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Week, Hours

• Is rule of thumb in writing game: if story requires many long descriptions of smells so vile that will give reader nausea, is not likely to find publisher.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Games, Smell

• If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

  Dean Koontz

  Passion, Writing, Style

• I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Pages, Revising

• The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work.

  Dean Koontz

  Hard Work, Writing, Desire

  Dean Koontz (2008). “Watchers”, p.374, Penguin

• I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Talking, Desire

• Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Writing, Boredom

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Thinking, People

• There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Writing, Fascination

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Names, Use

• The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Ideas, Literature

• If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap

  Dean Koontz

  Fall, Writing, Yelling

• If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Interesting, Starting Over

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

• I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Might, Next

  "Interview with the Master of Suspense, Dean Koontz (part 1)". Interview with Trisha Sugarek, www.writeratplay.com. June 28, 2014.

• 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

  Writing, Publicity, Sometimes

  "Interview with the Master of Suspense, Dean Koontz (part 1)". Interview with Trisha Sugarek, www.writeratplay.com. June 28, 2014.

• Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels pile up and one
  day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn't have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.

  Dean Koontz

  Dog, Book, Hard Work

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