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Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

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
Best
Buddies
Buddy
Efforts
Despite
Contrary
Effort
Fear

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I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
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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 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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I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
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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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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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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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A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
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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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I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.
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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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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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The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
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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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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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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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