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Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

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
Work
Forms
Writers
Fiction
Single
Form
Many
Unified
Feel
Entity
Feels
Eventually

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