Peter Straub > Quotes

“Wolf! Right here and now!”
― Peter Straub, The Talisman

“It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“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

“Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.”
― Peter Straub, If You Could See Me Now

“You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.”
― Peter Straub, Shadowland

“... He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“What was the worst thing you've ever done?
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...”
― Peter Straub

“...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, Ghost Story

“She thought, instead, with longing of more books—of buying books—of slipping into a narrative of other people’s lives. That was release.”
― Peter Straub, Julia

“In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“I liked the place I came from.
But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.
”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“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

“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

“To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.

A piece of the universe?

A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.”
― Peter Straub, Shadowland

“From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing -- all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain't gonna do that, nope.”
― Peter Straub, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.”
― Peter Straub, Mr. X

“Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.”
― Peter Straub (Author), Shadowland

“Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.”
― Peter Straub, Shadowland

“The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“Adventure is a nameless joy”
― Peter Straub (Author)

“It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.”
― Peter Straub

“David,” I said, “no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.”
― Peter Straub, A Dark Matter

“The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. Nothing," uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth.”
― Peter Straub, Shadowland

“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, The Throat

“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