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

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

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Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
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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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I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
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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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I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
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Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.
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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.
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Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
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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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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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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.
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There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.
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I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.
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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.
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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 believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
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Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.
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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 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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