Dean Koontz Quotes

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

I'm always interested in people being able to share stories that allow us to see the landscape of human foibles, challenges, and ultimately triumph.

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Quit dwelling on other people's stories and make up some of your own.

The most important thing to realize is that everyone is capable of telling a story.

I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.

I like stories about people. I like things that are human and different. I want to be as engaged in my work as I am in reading a book. I want to be electrified by the films I do.

A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.

Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that there are more of them. Everyone has chapters and cliffhangers. Everyone has their journey to make. Some go far and wide and come back empty-handed; some don’t go anywhere and their journey makes them richest of all. Some tales have a moral and some don’t make any sense. Some will make you laugh, others make you cry. The world is a library, young Poison, and you’ll never get to read the same book twice.

The world exists to end up in a book.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. Up until my first book was published I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: No, I didn't screw up.

I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.

People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.

A good movie humanizes people.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.