Peter Straub Quotes

What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.

I like that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing--that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around. They're the best moments in a day of writing -- when an image appears that you didn't know would be there when you started work in the morning.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you're writing from your subconscious, is beautiful - it's thrilling. When you're editing, which is your conscious mind, it's like torture.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se.

People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it's self-sustaining.

Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.