Dean Koontz Quotes

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the 'I'm a Fraud' phase. You go through the 'I'll Never Finish' phase. And every once in a while you think, 'What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?'

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

Writing is about confidence and wondering what the point of anything is.

I used to read about people who'd say, 'I dream my books, and then I write them down.' And I was like, 'Oh, please.'

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

Self-doubt creates the impetus for learning but hinders adept use of previously established skills

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts . . . and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

I learned that I was able to focus. I've always thought of myself as somebody who is like either it's there or it isn't there. I really worked at this, and I focused, and I was able to replace self-doubt with focus. That was something new for me to say self-doubt is there, but it does not need to be in the front row. You can ask it to take a back seat and replace that front row seat with focus.

Many of us believe that 'real artists' do not experience self-doubt. In truth, artists are people who have learned to live with doubt and do the work anyway.

A writer, or a beginning writer, is faced by the huge walls of self-consciousness. Most people think, "What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don't sound erudite and sophisticated? I'll be considered a fool." In time, with a lot of practice, you realize that's your foolishness is your gift.

By some fluke, my folks forgot to ask me the question most crucial to ensuring a lifetime of self-doubt: 'What if you fail?

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who's lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.