Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Straub
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: March 2
Author
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Would
Cities
Frozen
Present
Guide
Ornament
Violence
Fulfillment
Closure
Bring
Guides
Ornaments
Quality
Useless
Completion
Often
Wings
Absent
Body
City
Yearning
Without
Short
Wing

More quotes by Peter Straub

Image
I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
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
Image
The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.
Peter Straub
Image
I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
Peter Straub
Image
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.
Peter Straub
Image
Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
Peter Straub
Image
The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
Peter Straub
Image
I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
Peter Straub
Image
A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
Peter Straub
Image
With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it.
Peter Straub
Image
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
Image
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