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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

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Peter Straub
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Open
Sudden
Moment
Mask
Previously
Moments
Wearing
Split
Never
Bush
Splits
Would
Considered
Pigs
World
Surprise
Jumping
Ordinary
Reveal
Possibility
Frightening

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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)
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An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.
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The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
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I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
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I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
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Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.
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Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.
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I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.
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When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.
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Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
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I was once told by a very well-respected editor, Category horror is about good vs. evil, that's all it is. And I thought, That's why it's no good. That's why I find that stuff unreadable. One is looking for something that's a little more emotionally complex and nuanced.
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I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
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I wish I could go back and re-write my first novel for the first time. Because I really didn't know what I was doing, and although it was published, it is, after all this time, kind of an embarrassment.
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Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
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A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
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The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
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I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.
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You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.
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Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.
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Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
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