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Change Isn't Easy... Changing The Way You Live Means Changing What You Believe About Life. That's Hard... When We Make Our Own Misery, We Sometimes Cling To It Even When We Want So Bad To Change Because The Misery Is Something We Know. The Misery Is Comfortable.

-Dean Koontz

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Change Isn't Easy... Changing

Dean Koontz

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Change Isn't Easy... Changing The Way You Live Means Changing What You Believe About Life. That's Hard... When We Make Our Own Misery, We Sometimes Cling To It Even When We Want So Bad To Change Because The Misery Is Something We Know. The Misery Is Comfortable.

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Responsibility To Others

Sense Of Responsibility

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Never, Never Try To Scope The Market.

Change Isn't Easy... Changing The Way You Live Means Changing What You Believe About Life. That's Hard... When We Make Our Own Misery, We Sometimes Cling To It Even When We Want So Bad To Change Because The Misery Is Something We Know. The Misery Is Comfortable.

Books Had Shown Me, However, That All People Everywhere Wanted Their Lives To Have Purpose And Meaning. This Longing Was Universal.

Because People See Violence On The Movie Screen, They're Not Going To Go Out And Hold Up A Liquor Store And Kill Somebody. It Really Doesn't Correlate.

When We Don't Allow Ourselves To Hope, We Don't Allow Ourselves To Have Purpose. Without Purpose, Without Meaning, Life Is Dark. We've No Light Within, And We're Just Living To Die.

The Heart Is An Artist That Paints Over What Profoundly Disturbs It, Leaving On The Canvas A Less Dark, Less Sharp Version Of The Truth.

It's Only Life. We All Get Through It.

Thanks To The Circus Between My Ears, I Can Seize Upon The Smallest Disquieting Observation And From It Extrapolate A Terror Of Cataclysmic Proportions.

I've Always Operated With A Great Deal Of Self-doubt. Every Time I Start A New Book It's Like, Well, This One Will Destroy The Career And I Have To Overcome That Feeling Especially In The First Hundred Pages Of The Book.

Always, Beneath Every Apparent Chaos, Order Waits To Be Revealed.

And The Funny Thing Was If You Made The Best Of It, If You Smiled Through Every Storm, The Bad Things Were Never As Terrible As You Expected Them To Be, And The Good Things Were Better Than Anything You Could Have Wished For Yourself.

Not An Insult Sweetie. That Was A Thirteen Word Kiss.

The Hatred Of Truth Is The Taproot Of Violence.

In The Wind, The Trees, Like Agitated Lions Preparing To Roar, Shook Their Great Green Manes.

We Are Not Born To Wait. We Are Born To Do.

What Has Been Is No More. Change Has Come.

The Desire To Write Well Can Never Be Fulfilled Without Hard Work.

What We Do As A Society Is Seek Simple Answers.

My Life Has A Mysterious Purpose That I Don't Understand, And Day By Day, Conflict By Conflict, I Learn By Going Where I Have To Go.

I Imagined A Life That Turned Out To Be Pretty Much Exactly Like The One I've Had. That Fascinates Me Endlessly. I Wake Up Many Mornings, And It Almost Wouldn't Surprise Me If I Woke Up From It And It Was All A Dream.

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Fate Isn’t One Straight Road…there Are Forks In It, Many Different Routes To Different Ends. We Have The Free Will To Choose The Path.

In The Real World As In Dreams Nothing Is Quite What It Seems. -the Book Of Counted Sorrows

I Have To Admit That When I Watch A Movie In Which There Is No Moral Context For The Violence - I Find That Offensive. I Think That's Potentially Damaging To Society.

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There Are Days When It Seems To Me That In Literature The Most Convincing Depiction Of The World In Which We Live Is To Be Found In The Phantasmagorical Kingdom Through Which Lewis Carroll Took Alice On A Tour.

We're Out Of Cocktail Olives, It's A Tragedy Of Historic Proportions, But We're Coping Because We're Americans.

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No One Can Grant You Happiness. Happiness Is A Choice We All Have The Power To Make.

Happiness Is A Choice

I've Got A Long List Of Books I Wish I'd Never Written-and I've Kept Them All Out Of Print For The Past 20 Years.

We Need To Laugh At The Irrationality Of Evil, For In Doing So We Deny Evil's Power Over Us, Diminish Its Influence In The World, And Tarnish The Allure It Has For Some People.

Civilization Rests On The Fact That Most People Do The Right Thing Most Of The Time.

The Selfless Love That We Give To Others, To The Point Of Being Willing To Sacrifice Our Lives For Them, Is All The Proof I Need That Human Beings Are Not Mere Animals Of Self-interest. We Carry Within Us A Divine Spark, And If We Chose To Recognize It, Our Lives Have Dignity, Meaning, Hope.

Billy Pilgrim Had A Theory About Diaries. Women Were More Likely Than Men To Think That Their Lives Had Sufficient Meaning To Require Recording On A Daily Basis. It Was Not For The Most Part A God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey Kind Of Meaning, But More An I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares Sentimentalism That Passed For Meaning, And They Usually Stopped Keeping A Diary By The Time They Hit Thirty, Because By Then They Didn't Want To Ponder The Meaning Of Life Anymore Because It Scared The Crap Out Of Them.

I Have More Self-doubt Than Any Writer I've Ever Known.... The Positive Aspect Of Self-doubt - If You Can Channel It Into Useful Activity Instead Of Being Paralyzed By It - Is That By The Time You Reach The End Of A Novel, You Know Precisely Why You Made Every Decision In The Narrative, The Multiple Purposes Of Every Metaphor And Image.

We Are Buried When We're Born. The World Is A Place Of Graves Occupied And Graves Potential. Life Is What Happens While We Wait For Our Appointment With The Mortician.

In This Uncertain Space Between Birth And Death, Especially Here At The End Of The World In Moonlight Bay, We Need Hope As Surely As We Need Food And Water, Love And Friendship.

Love And Friendship

I Don't Mean To Imply That I'm Afraid Of Death. I'm Just Not Ready To Go Out On A Date With Him.

Loving The Ideal More Than The Reality Is The Cause Of All The Misery The Human Species Creates For Itself.

In Tragedy And Despair, When An Endless Night Seems To Have Fallen, Hope Can Be Found In The Realization Taht The Companion Of Night Is Not Another Night, That The Companion Of Night Is Day, That Darkness Always Gives Way To Light, And That Death Rules Only Half Of Creation, Life The Other Half.

I Always Enjoyed The Kids, But I Didn't Enjoy The Bureaucracy Of The Educational System.

You Have To Stop Worrying About Looking Foolish, 'cause Fear Of Being Humiliated Really Limits You.

We Have A Responsibility To Stand Watch Over One Another, We Are Watchers, All Of Us, Watchers, Guarding Against The Darkness.

We Must Seize Life Because We Never Know How Much Of It Remains For Us, That Faith Is The Antidote To Despair And That Laughter Is The Music Of Faith.

What Will Happen Will Happen. There Is Time For Miracles Until There Is No More Time, But Time Has No End.

Eventually, As My Books Became Best-sellers, The Nickels Pile Up And One Day I Was Offered A Substantial Four-book Deal That Was Lucrative As Any Airliner Hijacking In History. Though Writing Those Four Books Was Hard Work, At Least I Didn't Have To Wear Kevlar Body Armor, Carry Heavy Bandoliers Of Spare Ammunition, Or Work With Associates Named Mad Dog.

I Have Been Reading Stephen King Since Carrie And Hope To Read Him For Many Years To Come.

Please, Don't Torture Me With Cliches. If You're Going To Try To Intimidate Me, Have The Courtesy To Go Away For A While, Acquire A Better Education, Improve Your Vocabulary, And Come Back With Some Fresh Metaphors.

Pain Is A Gift. Humanity, Without Pain, Would Know Neither Fear Nor Pity. Without Fear, There Could Be No Humility, And Every Man Would Be A Monster. The Recognition Of Pain And Fear In Others Give Rise In Us To Pity, And In Our Pity Is Our Humanity, Our Redemption.

I Am Sustained By The Certainty That Life Has Meaning...as Does Death.

I Have Learned A Great Deal From Novels. Some Of It Is Even True.

Where There Is Cake, There Is Hope. And There Is Always Cake.

Not All Popular Novelists Are Good, But All Good Novelists Are, Sooner Or Later, Popular.

Sooner Or Later

Of All The Things We Can Feel With Our Minds And Bodies, Severe Pain Is The Purest, For It Drives Everything Else From Our Awareness And Focuses Us As Perfectly As We Can Ever Be Focused.

In This Age, Lies Were The Universal Lubricant Of The Culture. A Love Of Truth And Commitment To It Were Seldom Rewarded And Were Often Punished.

Readers Will Stay With An Author, No Matter What The Variations In Style And Genre, As Long As They Get That Sense Of Story, Of Character, Of Empathetic Involvement.

If Edgar Allan Poe Were Alive Today, His Agent Would Be Constantly Slapping Him Upside The Head With Tightly Rolled Copies Of His Brilliant Short Stories And Novelettes, Yelling, 'full-length Novels, You Moron! Pay Attention! What's The Matter With You -- Are You Shooting Heroin Or Something? Write For The Market! No More Of This Midlength 'fall Of The House Of Usher' Crap

It's Only Life. We All Get Through It. Not All Of Us Complete The Journey In The Same Condition. Along The Way, Some Lose Their Legs Or Eyes In Acidents Or Altercations, While Others Skate Through The Years With Nothing Worse To Worry About Than An Occassional Bad-hair Day. I Still Possessed Both Legs And Both Eyes, And Even My Hair Looked All Right When I Rose That Wednesday Morning In Late January. If I Returned To Bed Sixteen Hours Later, Having Lost All My Hair But Nothing Else, I Would Consider The Day A Triumph. Even Minus A Few Teeth, I'd Call It A Triumph.

When A Knot Gets To Tight, You Can Always Cut The Rope

Sometimes Waiting Is The Hardest Thing.

Less Real Than Such Threats As A Man With A Gun, A Woman With A Knife, Or A U.s. Senator With An Idea.

The Answer To The Mystery Of Existence Is The Love You Shared Sometimes So Imperfectly, And When The Loss Wakes You To The Deeper Beauty Of It, To The Sanctity Of It, You Can't Get Off Your Knees For A Long Time, You're Driven To Your Knees Not By The Weight Of The Loss But By Gratitude For What Preceded The Loss.

In Real Life During The Last Decade Of The Twentieth Century, Rumpelstiltskin Would Probably Get The Queen's Daughter. He Would No Doubt Addict Her To Heroin, Turn Her Out As A Prostitute, Confiscate Her Earnings, Beat Her For Pleasure, Hack Her To Pieces, And Escape Justice By Claiming That Society's Intolerance For Bad-tempered, Evil-minded Trolls Had Driven Him Temporarily Insane.

Any Drunk Who Has Tried To Put His Car Where A Lamppost Stands Is A Self-educated Physicist.

Funny, How One Good Cookie Could Calm The Mind And Even Elevate A Troubled Soul.

To A Predator, Fear Indicates Weakness.

Never Leave A Friend Behind. Friends Are All We Have To Get Us Through This Life--and They Are The Only Things From This World That We Could Hope To See In The Next.

In Self-defense And In Defense Of The Innocent, Cowardice Is The Only Sin.

This World, Which Has The Potential To Be Eden, Is Instead The Hell Before Hell. In Our Arrogance, We Have Made It So.

He Is Different, And There Will Be Many People You Love Who Will Be Unhappy With You. You Don’t Want Them To Feel You’ve Dishonored Them. Yes, I Know How It Is. But Life Is Short. A Chance For Great Happiness Doesn’t Come Along All That Often.

...in An Infinite Universe, Anything That Could Be Imagined Might Somewhere Exist.

Infinite Universe

Once You Have Had A Wonderful Dog, A Life Without One, Is A Life Diminished.

The Only Thing I Know For Sure Is How Much I Do Not Know.

He Felt ... A Suspicion-no, A Conviction-than He Had Been Abandoned, Forgotten, And That No One In The Whole World Cared Or Would Ever Care Enough About Him To Really Find Out What He Was Like And What His Dreams Were. He Was An Outcast, A Creature Somehow Vastly Different From All Other People, An Object Of Scorn And Derision, An Outsider, Secretly Loathed And Ridiculed By Everyone Who Met Him, Even By Those Few Who Professed To Love Him.

The Whisper Of The Dusk Is Night Shedding Its Husk.

For Some, The Past Is A Chain, Each Day A Link, Raveling Backward To One Ringbolt Or Another, In One Dark Place Or Another, And Tomorrow Is A Slave To Yesterday.

Each Book Is A Mind Alive, A Life Revealed, A World Awaiting Exploration, But Living People Are All Those Things, As Well—and More, Because Their Stories Haven’t Yet Been Completely Told.

Pain Can Be Endured And Defeated Only If It Is Embraced. Denied Or Feared, It Grows.

The World Is A Very Complex And Interesting Place And That Is What I Really Want My Fiction To Say: Wake Up To How Amazing The World Is.

The World Needed A Little Evil, So Good Had Something To Compare Itself To, But You Couldn't Let It Think It Had The Right-of-way On The Road And An Invitation To Dinner.

The Recognition Of Pain And Fear In Others Give Rise In Us To Pity, And In Our Pity Is Our Humanity, Our Redemption.

I Can Love October In September. September Doesn’t Care.

If You Have To Pay The Bills, And You Write Something You're Not Proud Of, Use A Pen-name For That.

The Less Depth A Belief System Has, The Greater The Fervency With Which Its Adherents Embrace It. The Most Vociferous, The Most Fanatical Are Those Whose Cobbled Faith Is Founded On The Shakiest Grounds.

Every Book Has Some Real Life In It. I Was Never Pursued By An Evil Twin Clone, But Everything Else In Mr. Murder Was Pretty Much Out Of My Own Life.

Fire, Ice, Asteroids And Pole Shifts Are Bogeymen With Which We Distract Ourselves From The Real Threat Of Our Time. In An Age When Everyone Invents His Own Truth, There Is No Community, Only Factions. Without Community, There Can Be No Consensus To Resist The Greedy, The Envious, The Power-mad Narcissists Who Seize Control And Turn The Institutions Of Civilization Into A Series Of Doom Machines.

A Short-order Cook, Just Off Work, Makes Easy Tracking For Lions And Worse

Too Many Dogs Continue To Be Abused And Abandond - One Is Too Many - And People Continue To Kill People For Money And Envy And No Reason At All. Bad People Succeed And Good People Fail, But That's Not The End Of The Story. Miracles Happen That Nobody Sees, And Among Us Walk Heroes Who Are Never Recognised, And People Live In Loneliness Because They Cannot Believe They Are Loved

She Might Have Been Born This Way, Without An Empathy Gene And Other Essentials. In That Case, She Would Interpret Any Kindness As Weakness. Among Predatory Beasts, Any Display Of Weakness Is An Invitation To Attack.

Dogs Are One Of Those Things That Make You Happy And Make You Wonder.

Fate Cannot Be Sidestepped Or Outrun.

As Long As I Have Laughter, I Am Not Without Hope

Love And Sausage Are Alike. Can Never Have Enough Of Either.

Besides, I Can't Get To Where I Want To Go By Conscious Or Unconscious Suicide. I've Got My Strange Little Life To Lead. Leading It The Best I Can - That's How I Buy The Ticket To Where I Want To Be.

The Worst Happens When You Least Expect It

People Couldn't Bear To Go On Living If They Faced Every Cold Truth About Themselves.

I Think It's Perfectly Just To Refuse Service To Anyone Based On Behavior, But Not Based On Race Or Religion.

When It Came To Formal Classes, I Was A Slacker. But I've Always Been A Diligent Autodidact And Can Teach Myself Virtually Any Subject If I Have A Serious Interest In It.

Even In The Darkest Moments, Light Exists If You Have The Faith To See It. Fear Is A Poison Produced By The Mind, And Courage Is The Antidote Stored Always In The Soul. In Misfortune Lies The Seed Of Future Triumph.

All I Ask Of Fate Is That The People She Hurls Into My Life, Whether They Are Evil Or Good, Or Morally Bipolar, Should Be Amusing To One Degree Or Another.... The Problem Is Finding Smile-inducing Evil People, Because The Evil Are The Most Humorless, Though In The Movies They Frequently Get Some Of The Best Lines.

We Are Not Strangers To Ourselves, We Only Try To Be.

One Of The Things I Like Enormously About Bob Weinstein Is That That He's The Only Studio Head I Have Ever Known Who Will Change His Mind And Say He Was Wrong.

But Once An Idea For A Novel Seizes A Writer...well, It’s Like An Inner Fire That At First Warms You And Makes You Feel Good But Then Begins To Eat You Alive, Burn You Up From Within. You Can’t Just Walk Away From The Fire; It Keeps Burning. The Only Way To Put It Out Is To Write The Book.

If We Were Capable Of Thinking Of Everything, We Would Still Be Living In Eden, Rent-free With All-you-can-eat Buffets And Infinitely Better Daytime Tv Programming.

While Life Could Be Evaded, Death Could Not.

Its A Rare Thing To Know One Completly To The Core And Stil Love Him

Pain Can Be Endured And Defeated Only If It Is Embraced. Denied Or Feared, It Grows In Perception If Not In Reality. The Best Response To Terror Is Righteous Anger, Confidence In Ultimate Justice, A Refusal To Be Intimidated.

The Things We Worry About The Most Are Never The Things That Bite Us. The Sharpest Teeth Always Take Their Nip Of Us When We Are Looking The Other Way.

Death Came, Death Went, But Commerce Flowed Eternal.

Every Life Is Complicated, Every Mind A Kingdom Of Unmapped Mysteries.

Every World Has Dogs Or Their Equivalent, Creatures That Thrive On Companionship, Creatures That Are Of A High Order Of Intelligence Although Not The Highest And That Therefore Is Simple Enough In Their Wants And Needs To Remain Innocent. The Combination Of Their Innocence And Their Intelligence Allows Them To Serve As A Bridge Bewtween What Is Transient And What Is Eternal, Between The Finate And The Infinate.

That Was One Of The Most Fundamental And Sacred Duties Good Friends And Families Performed For One Another! They Tended The Flame Of Memory, So No One’s Death Meant An Immediate Vanishment From The World; In Some Sense The Deceased Would Live On After Their Passing, At Least As Long As Those Who Loved Them Lived. Such Memories Were An Essential Weapon Against The Chaos Of Life And Death, A Way To Ensure Some Continuity From Generation To Generation, An Order Of Endorsement And Meaning.

He Once Told Me That An August Evening Was "as Hot As Three Toads In A Cuisinart," A Comparison That Left Me Blinking Two Days Later.

Between Birth And Burial, We Find Ourselves In A Comedy Of Mysteries. If You Don't Think Life Is Mysterious, If You Believe You Have It All Mapped Out, You Aren't Paying Attention Or You've Anesthetized Yourself With Booze Or Drugs, Or With A Comforting Ideology. And If You Don't Think Life's A Comedy - Well, Friend, You Might As Well Hurry Along To That Burial. The Rest Of Us Need People With Whom We Can Laugh. -odd Thomas -odd Apocalypse By Dean Koontz Pg 30 Chapter 4

Every Eye Sees Its Own Special Vision; Every Ear Hears A Most Different Song. In Each Man's Troubled Heart, An Incision Would Reveal A Unique, Shameful Wrong.

The Most Identifying Trait Of Humanity Is Our Abilty To Be Inhumane To One Another.

I Come Down On The Side Of Free Will But I Have Sympathy For Those Who Believe In Fate Because There Is Something About Life Which We Feel We Have No Control Over.

We Are Not, However, A Species That Can Choose The Baggage With Which We Must Travel. In Spite Of Our Best Intentions, We Always Find That We Have Brought Along A Suitcase Or Two Of Darkness And Despair.

In My Books, I Never Portray Violence As A Reasonable Solution To A Problem. If The Lead Characters In The Story Are Driven To It, It's At The Extreme End Of Their Experience.

One Man's Idea Of Perfect Order Is Another Man's Chaos.

...i Felt Fear Enter The Halls Of My Mind, But I Didn't Give It The Keys To Every Room.

Human Cruelty And Treachery Surpassed All Understanding. There Were No Answers. Only Excuses.

Although I've Said A Million Times That I'm Not A Horror Writer, I Do Like Horror.

I've Had Good Publishers And Bad Publishers, And You've Got To Learn When The Advice Is Sensible And When It's Not.

Then What Are You? An Electronic Hannibal Lector? You Can't Eat My Liver With Fava Beans Through A Modem, You Know.

Language Can't Describe Reality. Literature Has No Stable Reference, No Real Meaning. Each Reader's Interpretation Is Equally Valid, More Important Than The Author's Intention. In Fact, Nothing In Life Has Meaning. Reality Is Subjective. Values And Truths Are Subjective. Life Itself Is A Kind Of Illusion. Blah, Blah, Blah, Let's Have Another Scotch.

Sometimes It Seemed That The Human Heart, This Side Of Eden, Feared Life More Than Death, Light More Than Darkness, Freedom More Than Surrender.

Loss Is The Hardest Thing, I Said. But It's Also The Teacher That's The Most Difficult To Ignore.

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