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Dogs Invite Us Not Only To Share Their Joy But Also To Live In The Moment, Where We Are Neither Proceeding From Nor Moving Toward, Where The Enchantment Of The Past And Future Cannot Distract Us, Where A Freedom From Practical Desire And A Cessation Of Our Usual Ceaseless Action Allows Us To Recognize The Truth Of Our Existence, The Reality Of Our World And Purpose--if We Dare.

-Dean Koontz

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Dogs Invite Us Not

Dean Koontz

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Dogs Invite Us Not Only To Share Their Joy But Also To Live In The Moment, Where We Are Neither Proceeding From Nor Moving Toward, Where The Enchantment Of The Past And Future Cannot Distract Us, Where A Freedom From Practical Desire And A Cessation Of Our Usual Ceaseless Action Allows Us To Recognize The Truth Of Our Existence, The Reality Of Our World And Purpose--if We Dare.

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Maybe I'm Needy, Neurotic, Paranoid. Under The Circumstances, Of Course, If I Weren't Needy, Neurotic, And Paranoid, I'd Obviously Be Psychotic.

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Houses Are Not Haunted. We Are Haunted, And Regardless Of The Architecture With Which We Surround Ourselves, Our Ghosts Stay With Us Until We Ourselves Are Ghosts.

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Intuition Is Seeing With The Soul.

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What Most People Find Important, You Do Not. This Is Wisdom. To What You Believe Is Important, You Are Ready To Give Your Mind, Heart, And Soul. This Is Grace.

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If I Drive Myself To The Brink Of My Ability, Then I Don't Get Stale Or Bored.

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Each Reader Needs To Bring His Or Her Own Mind And Heart To The Text.

Are You Prepared For The First Wound?

Fear Is A Hammer, And When The People Are Beaten Finally To The Conviction That Their Existence Hangs By A Frayed Thread, They Will Be Led Where They Need To Go.

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

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Stay Low, Stay Quiet, Keep It Simple, Don't Expect Too Much, Enjoy What You Have.

I Believe That I Was A Dog In A Past Life. That's The Only Thing That Would Explain Why I Like To Snack On Purina Dog Chow.

...like A Scene From The Swamps Of Louisiana Or The Mind Of Poe On Opium.

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I Have A Sofa On Which I Never Nap, Big Windows With An Ocean View That I Rarely See Because I Keep The Pleated Shades Down At All Times While Working. I Know I'm A Potential Slacker, So I Don't Tempt Myself.

He Was Sure That He Was Not The Cause Of The Abrupt Silence. His Passage Through The Canyon Had Not Previously Disturbed Either Birds Or Cicadas. Something Was Out There. An Intruder Of Which The Ordinary Forest Creatures Clearly Did Not Approve. He Took A Deep Breath And Held It Again, Straining To Hear The Slightest Movement In The Woods. This Time He Detected The Rustle Of Brush, A Snapping Twig, The Soft Crunch Of Dry Leaves-and The Unnervingly Peculiar, Heavy, Ragged Breathing Of Something Big.

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

I Don't Write A Quick Draft And Then Revise; Instead, I Work Slowly Page By Page, Revising And Polishing.

The Broom Wasn't As Comforting As A Flamethrower Would Have Been, But It Was Better Than A Mop And Certainly More Threatening Than A Feather Duster.

Death Came, Death Went, But Commerce Flowed Eternal.

I Don't Find Slashing And Blood Flying Everywhere To Be Scary. I Just Find It Repulsive.

We Live In God's Amusement Park.

Amusement Parks

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.

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.

A Silent Dark...as Black As A Moonless Lake, As A Ravine's Wings, Darkness There And Nothing More, Merely This And Nothing More.

On Those Occasions When He Had Killed In The Dark, He Later Needed To See His Victims' Faces Because, In Some Unlit Corner Of His Heart, He Half Expected To Find His Own Face Looking Up At Him, Ice-white And Dead-eyed. "deep Down," The Dream-victim Had Said, "you Know That You're Already Dead Yourself, Burnt Out Inside. You Realize That You Have Far More In Common With Your Victims After You've Killed Them Than Before.

The Saddest Thing In The World Was That Human Beings, For All Their Ardent Striving And Desire, Could Never Achieve Physical, Emotional, Or Intellectual Perfection. The Species Was Doomed To Imperfection; It Thrashed Forever In Despair Or Denial Of That Fact.

Some Lives, Conducted With Grace, Are Beautiful Arcs Bridging This World To Eternity.

Fate Cannot Be Sidestepped Or Outrun.

We Can Approach Belief From An Intellectual Path, But In The End, God Must Be Taken On Faith. Proofs Are For Things Of This World, Things In Time And Of Time, Not Beyond Time.

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.

He Said, If You Allow Yourself To Be Enchanted By The Beauty To Be Seen In Even Ordinary Things, Then All Things Proved To Be Extraordinary.

I Am Basically A Pretty Good Autodidact. I Can Teach Myself Things.

Never, Never Try To Scope The Market.

I Love My Editor, But That Would Be The Definition Of Hell To Me To Live With Someone And Have Them Go Page By Page Through My Manuscript. That I Want To Avoid At All Costs.

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.

The Hatred Of Truth Is The Taproot Of Violence.

A Plot Without Action Is Like Pasta Without Garlic, Like Dolly Parton Without Cleavage, And Like A Writer Without His Similes.

I Build A Book The Way Coral Reefs Are Built: Millions Of Little Calcareous Skeletons Piling Up One Atop Another, Though In My Case The Skeletons Are Drafts.

Truth Is Always Stranger Than Fiction. We Craft Fiction To Match Our Sense Of How Things Ought To Be, But Truth Cannot Be Crafted. Truth Is, And Truth Has A Way Of Astonishing Us To Our Knees. Reminding Us, That The Universe Does Not Exist To Fulfill Our Expectations. Because We Are Imperfect Beings Who Are Self-blinded To The Truth Of The World’s Stunning Complexity, We Shave Reality To Paper Thin Theories And Ideologies That We Can Easily Grasp – And We Call Them Truths. But The Truth Of A Sea In All It’s Immensity Cannot Be Embodied In One Tidewashed Pebble.

The Biggest Advice Is Being True To What You Want To Do. Don't Worry If Other People Understand It Or Don't Understand It. If What You're Doing Has Merit, It Will Find Its Way.

Whiskers Of The Cat, Webbed Toes On My Swimming Dog; God Is In The Details.

She Says What Holds Their Marriage Together Is That She Feels Too Damn Sorry For Him To Ask For A Divorce.

Much Of Her Life Had Been Lived Like A Balancing Act On A Spearpoint Fence, And On A Particularly Difficult Night When She Was Twelve, She Had Decided That Instinct Was, In Fact, The Quiet Voice Of God. Prayers Did Receive Replies, But You Had To Listen Closely And Believe In The Answer. At Twelve, She Wrote In Her Diary: "god Doesn't Shout; He Whispers, And In The Whisper Is The Way.

Pain Is A Gift. Humanity, Without Pain, Would Know Neither Fear Nor Pity.

Pain Is All I Know." He Murmured. "peace Is All I Want

But The More People We Love And The More Deeply We Love Them, The More Vulnerable We Are To Loss And Grief And Loneliness.

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

When A Liar Became Too Skilled At Deception, He Could Lose The Ability To Discern Truth, And Could Himself Be More Easily Deceived.

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.

Lots Of People Are Unable To See All Kinds Of Truths Right In Front Of Their Eyes." "the World Is What We Make It, And Our Future Is Ours To Shape.

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

Grief Is A Healthy Emotion, And It's Healthy To Embrace It. By Accepting Loss, We Clarify Our Values And The Meaning Of Our Lives.

Everything Happens For A Reason

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

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

Sooner Or Later

The Worst Happens When You Least Expect It

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

Darkness Dwells Within Even The Best Of Us. In The Worst Of Us, Darkness Not Only Dwells But Reigns.

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

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.

Time Doesn’t, As Advertised, Heal All Wounds. Although The Wrenching Immediacy Of Grief Eventually Passed, The Settled Sorrow That Replaced It Might In Its Own Way Be Even More Intense.

Books Showed Me That There Were Other Ways To Live A Life.

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.

Like All Of Us In This Storm Between Birth And Death, I Can Wreak No Great Changes On The World, Only Small Changes For The Better, I Hope, In The Lives Of Those I Love.

Perhaps Extreme Danger Strips Us Of All Pretenses, All Ambitions, All Confusions, Focusing Us More Intensely Than We Are Otherwise Ever Focused, So That We Remember What We Otherwise Spend Most Of Our Lives Forgetting: That Our Nature And Purpose Is, More Than Anything Else, To Love And To Make Love, To Take Joy From The Beauty Of The World, To Live With An Awareness That The Future Is Not As Real A Place For Any Of Us As Are The Present And The Past.

Evil Itself May Be Relentless. I Will Grant You That, But Love Is Relentless Too. Friendship Is A Relentless Force. Family Is A Relentless Force. Faith Is Relentless Force. The Human Spirit Is Relentless, And The Human Heart Outlasts - And Can Defeat - Even The Most Relentless Force Of All, Which Is Time.

I Work On One Page, Revising And Polishing Until I Can't Make It Better, Then Move On To The Next. Some Pages Might Get 20 Or More Drafts Before I Move On.

I Really Believe That Everyone Has A Talent, Ability, Or Skill That He Can Mine To Support Himself And To Succeed In Life.

There's No Use Wasting Are Energy Being Afraid Of The Devils, Demons And Things That Go Bump In The Night... Because Ultimately We'll Never Encounter Anything More Terrifying Than The Monster Among Us. Hell Is Where We Make It.

What We Do As A Society Is Seek Simple Answers.

The Brain Acknowledged The Approach Of Death While The Heart Stubbornly Insisted Upon Immortality.

Perseverance Is Impossible If We Don't Permit Ourselves To Hope.

While I Like People, I Do Also Like Being Alone In A Room And Seeing What You Can Do With A Particular Theme Or Subject.

Like Being Alone

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.

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 A Book, Even The Real Bastards Can't Hurt You. And You Can Never Loose A Friend You Make In A Book. When You Get To A Sad Part, No One's There To See You Cry. Or Wonder Why You Don't Cry When You Should.

I Never Discuss A Novel While I'm Writing It, For Fear That Talking About It Will Diminish My Desire To Write It.

A Great Deal Of Phenomenal Experience Has Fostered In Me A Flexibility Of The Mind And Imagination That Some Might Call Madness

In This World Only The Paranoid Survive.

Loneliness Comes In Two Basic Varieties. When It Results From A Desire For Solitude, Loneliness Is A Door We Close Against The World. When The World Instead Rejects Us, Loneliness Is An Open Door, Unused.

What Doesn't Quicken Dies. That's An Indisputable Truth Of Life.

... And She Had Worn Bitterness As Though It Were A Crown.

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.

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. The Trick, However, Is To Remember That Hope Is A Perilous Thing, That It's Not A Steel And Concrete Bridge Across The Void Between This Moment And A Brighter Future. Hope Is No Stronger Than Tremulous Beads Of Dew Strung On A Filament Of Spider Web, And It Alone Can't Long Support The Terrible Weight Of An Anguished Mind And A Tortured Heart.

I Always Thought Happiness Was A Choice And I Always Chose Things That Made Me Happy, And Books Were One Of Those.

It Will All Be Better In The End And If It Is Not Better Then It Must Not Be The End Yet

The Dead Are Merely The Countrymen Of My Future.

I Receive About 10,000 Letters A Year From Readers, And In The First Year After A Book Is Published, Perhaps 5,000 Letters Will Deal Specifically With That Piece Of Work.

Rub-a-dub-dub. Cerebrum In A Tub.

There Is Nothing Fatherly About Time And What It Does To Us, Either.

You Can Con God And Get Away With It, Granny Said, If You Do So With Charm And Wit. If You Live Your Life With Imagination And Verve, God Will Play Along Just To See What Outrageously Entertaining Thing You'll Do Next.

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

Little Mouse, You Were So Quick, So Bright, So Sweet, So Full Of Life. And You Still Are Everything You Were Then. None Of It’s Lost Forever. All That Promise, All That Hope, That Love And Goodness—it’s Still Inside You. No One Can Take The Gifts God Gave You. Only You.

The Whisper Of The Dusk Is Night Shedding Its Husk.

I Am The One, And I See All. But The Blind Man In Apartment 1-a Is Blind In Many Ways, As Are All Human Beings, Even Those With Functioning Eyes. They Are Blind To Their Folly, To Their Ignorance, To Their History, To The Future That They Will Make For Themselves. A Future Born Of Self-loathing.

All Human Lives Are So Profoundly And Intricately Entwined-those Dead, Those Living, Those Generations Yet To Come-that The Fate Of All Is The Fate Of Each, And The Hope Of Humanity Rests In Every Heart And In Every Pair Of Hands.

Southerners Have Many Fine Qualities, Charm And Civility Among Them, And A Sense Of The Tragic.

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.

What Does Worry Accomplish Except To Breed More Worry?

I Never Have Lunch Because It Makes Me Foggy-headed.

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.

...at It's Best Fiction Is Medicine.

Given My Heritage And The Ordeal Of My Childhood, I Sometimes Wonder Why I Myself Am Not Insane. Maybe I Am.

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

Night Has Patterns That Can Be Read Less By The Living Than By The Dead.

There's Never Any Humongous Next Draft. I Know A Writer Who Every Time He Finished A Novel - You Would Know His Name Very Well - But His Editor Would Come And Live With Him For A Month. And They Would Go Through The Manuscript Together.

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

Nearly Everything That Was Fun, Of Course, Was Also A Little Dangerous: Riding Roller Coasters, Skydiving, Gambling, Sex.

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

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

I Have Advice For New Writers, First Of All, At Any Time In The History Of Publishing In My Experience, There Will Be Endless Number People Telling You That You Can't Do What You Are Trying To Do. You Won't Succeed, There's Something Else You Should Be Doing.

Some Argued That The Youth Of Today Were Poorly Educated And Insufficiently Industrious, But One Of Them Had Sought To Validate His Generation By Spending Considerable Time And Effort Chiseling An Obscene Word In The Concrete Picnic Table, And He Had Spelled It Correctly.

What Year These Events Transpired Is Of No Consequence. Where They Occured Is Not Important. The Time Is Always, And The Place Is Everywhere.

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

Most Universities Are No Longer Temples Of Knowledge, But Of Power, And True Moderns Worship There.

I Like To Deal With Every Aspect Of Our Condition, And That Means Terror And Humor In Equal Mix. Some Books Have More Room For Humor Than Others.

Strangely Enough, For Many Many Years I Didn't Talk About My Childhood And Then When I Did I Got A Ton Of Mail - Literally Within A Year I Got A Couple Of Thousand Letters From People Who'd Had A Worse Childhood, A Similar Childhood, A Less-bad Childhood, And The Question That Was Most Often Posed To Me In Those Letters Was: How Did You Get Past The Trauma Of Being Raised By A Violent Alcoholic?

Sometimes Many Publishers Prefer That You Write The Same Book Every Time, But I Have A Low Boredom Threshold So That Isn't Going To Happen.

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

I Have Avoided Becoming Stale By Putting A Little Water On The Plate, Lying On The Plate, And Having Myself Refreshed In A Toaster Oven For 23 Minutes Once Every Month.

If Something In Your Writing Gives Support To People In Their Lives, That’s More Than Just Entertainment-w Hich Is What We Writers All Struggle To Do, To Touch People.

I'm No More A Wonder Than Anyone. And That's What Makes The World Magical. Every Baby's A Seed Of Wonder - That Gets Watered Or It Doesn't.

There's Lots Of Law These Days, But Not Much Justice. Celebrities Murder Their Wives And Go Free. A Mother Kills Her Children, And The News People On Tv Say She's The Victim And Want You To Send Money To Her Lawyers. When Everything's Upside Down Like This, What Fool Just Sits Back And Thinks Justice Will Prevail?

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

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

Despair Is Good. Despair Can Be The Nadir Of One Life And The Starting Point Of An Ascent Into Another, Better One.

You Can't Always Win Arguments As A Writer, But You Have To Just Go Ahead And Say, Well, I'm Doing It That Way Anyway.

There Are Thousands Of Proteins In The Cells, Some Of Them Very Large Chains Of Molecules. And The Cell Doesn't Function If One Of Those Chains Of Molecules Isn't There, And You Start Looking At The Complexity Of Life And The Mystery Of Life, And Then Start Thinking About Things Like The Twenty Universal Constants, That If Any One Of Them From Plank's Minimum To The Mass Of A Proton, If One Of Them Is The Tiniest Bit Off, There Would Be No Life Or Possibility Of It In The Universe.

I Can't Go On To Page Two Until I Can Get Page One As Perfect As I Can Make It. That Might Mean I Will Rewrite And Rewrite Page One 20, 30, 50, 100 Times.

Humanity Is A Parade Of Fools, And I Am At The Front Of It, Twirling A Baton.

That Is, Jack Thought, The Way Of Life. The Horror Changes Us, Because We Can Never Forget. Cursed With Memory. It Starts When We're Old Enough To Know What Death Is And Realize That Sooner Or Later We'll Lose Everyone We Love. We're Never The Same. But Somehow We're All Right. We Go On.

This May Be The Primary Purpose Of Dogs: To Restore Our Sense Of Wonder And To Help Us Maintain It, To Make Us Consider That We Should Trust Our Intuition As They Trust Theirs And To Help Us Realize That A Thing Known Intuitively Can Be As Real As Anything Known By Material Experience.

Don't Tell Me What's Necessary, You Presumptupus Pup. What's Necessary Is Whatever I Wish To Do, Regardless Of How Unnecessary It Might Be.

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 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.

As An Attorney, I Assure You The Law Isn't A Line Engraved In Marble, Immovable And Unchangeable Through The Centuries. Rather The Law Is Like A String, Fixed At Both Ends But With A Great Deal Of Play In It Very Loose, The Line Of The Law So You Can Stretch It This Way Or That, Rearrange The Arc Of It So You Are Nearly Always Short Of Blatant Theft Or Cold-blooded Murder Safely On The Right Side. That's A Daunting Thing To Realize But True.

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

The True Nature Of The World Was Weirder Than Any Bizarre Fabric That Anyone Might Weave From The Warp And Weft Of Imagination's Loom.

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

The Human Imagination May Be The Most Elastic Thing In The Universe, Stretching To Encompass The Millions Of Dreams That In Centuries Of Relectless Struggle Built Modern Civilization, To Entertain The Endless Doubts That Hamper Every Human Enterprise, And To Conceive The Vast Menagerie Of Boogeymen That Trouble Every Human Heart.

Maybe The Devil In Human Beings Isn't The Reflection Of The Devil, Perhaps The Devil Is Only A Reflection Of The Savagery And Brutality Of Our Kind. Maybe What We've Done Is Create The Devil In Our Own Image

What Looks Tragic Might Be Comic On Second Consideration, And What Is Comic Might Bring Tears In Time.

Nothing Is Worse Than Being Alone On The Evening Of The Day When One's Cow Has Exploded.

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Antonio Lobo Antunes

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