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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.

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
Phrases
Dozens
Sent
Rewrite
Usually
Clumsy
Friend
Wished
Least
Copy
Happened
Copies
Times
Noticed
Something
Dozen
Reread

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I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
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A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
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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 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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Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.
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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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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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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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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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I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
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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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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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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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You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.
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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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Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
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Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
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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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