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The Problem With Movies And Books Is They Make Evil Look Glamorous, Exciting, When It's No Such Thing. It's Boring And It's Depressing And It's Stupid. Criminals Are All After Cheap Thrills And Easy Money, And When They Get Them, All They Want Is More Of The Same, Over And Over. They're Shallow, Empty, Boring People Who Couldn't Give You Five Minutes Of Interesting Conversation If You Had The Piss-poor Luck To Be At A Party Full Of Them. Maybe Some Can Be Monkey-clever, Some Of The Time, But They Aren't Hardly Ever Smart.

-Dean Koontz

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The Problem With Movies

Dean Koontz

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The Problem With Movies And Books Is They Make Evil Look Glamorous, Exciting, When It's No Such Thing. It's Boring And It's Depressing And It's Stupid. Criminals Are All After Cheap Thrills And Easy Money, And When They Get Them, All They Want Is More Of The Same, Over And Over. They're Shallow, Empty, Boring People Who Couldn't Give You Five Minutes Of Interesting Conversation If You Had The Piss-poor Luck To Be At A Party Full Of Them. Maybe Some Can Be Monkey-clever, Some Of The Time, But They Aren't Hardly Ever Smart.

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

Because God Is Never Cruel, There Is A Reason For All Things. We Must Know The Pain Of Loss; Because If We Never Knew It, We Would Have No Compassion For Others, And We Would Become Monsters Of Self-regard, Creatures Of Unalloyed Self-interest. The Terrible Pain Of Loss Teaches Humility To Our Prideful Kind, Has The Power To Soften Uncaring Hearts, To Make A Better Person Of A Good One.

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.

Love Was A Sacred Garment, Woven Of A Fabric So Thin That It Could Not Be Seen, Yet So Strong That Even Mighty Death Could Not Tear It, A Garment That Could Not Be Frayed By Use, That Brought Warmth Into What Would Otherwise Be An Intolerable, Cold World- But At Times Love Could Also Be As Heavy As Chain Mail. Bearing The Burden Of Love, On Those Occasions When It Was A Solemn Weight, Made It More Precious When, In Better Times, It Caught The Wind In Sleeves Like Wings, And Lifted You.

When I Am Battered And Oppressed By The World That Humanity Has Made - Which Is Difference From The World That Is Was Given - My Primary Defense, My Consolation, Is The Absurdity Of That World

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.

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.

Pure, Hard-core Liberals Believe In A Superior Race. They Think They're It. They Believe They're More Intelligent Than The General Run Of Mankind, Better Suited Than The Little People Are To Manage The Little People's Lives. They Think They Have The One True Vision, The Ability To Solve All The Moral Dilemmas Of The Century. They Prefer Big Government Because That Is The First Step To Totalitarianism, Toward Unquestioned Rule By The Elite. And Of Course They See Themselves As The Elite.

In This World Only The Paranoid Survive.

To Many People, Free Will Is A License To Rebel Not Against What Is Unjust Or Hard In Life But Against What Is Best For Them And True.

She Blinked, Sat Up, And Saw Chris In The Bathroom Doorway. He'd Just Gotten Out The Shower. His Hair Was Damp, And He Was Dressed Only In His Briefs. The Sight Of His Thin, Boyish Body - All Ribs And Elbows And Knees - Pulled At Her Heart, For He Looked So Innocent And Vulnerable. He Was So Small And Fragile That She Wondered How She Could Ever Protect Him, And Renewed Fear Rose In Her.

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.

We May Lack Riches, But The Greatest Fortune Is What Lies In Our Hearts.

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.

Vladimir Nabokov Said The Two Great Evils Of The 20th Century Were Marx And Freud. He Was Absolutely Correct.

Few Human Beings Give Of Themselves To Another As A Dog Gives Of Itself.

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.

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

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

Mankind Has No Right To Employ Its Genius In The Creation Of Another Intelligent Species, Then Treat It Like Property. If We've Come So Far That We Can Create As God Creates, Then We Have To Learn To Act With The Justice And Mercy Of God.

Life, Stormy Says, Is Not About How Fast You Run Or Even With What Degree Of Grace. It's About Perseverance, About Staying On Your Feet And Slogging Forward No Matter What.

A Man Begins Dying At The Moment Of His Birth. Most People Live In Denial Of Death's Patient Courtship Until, Late In Life And Deep In Sickness, They Become Aware Of Him Sitting Bedside.

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.

If I Had To Write A Rough Draft, All The Way Through And Then Go Back And Start Over, I Probably Would Just Stop Writing. I Wouldn't Find That Interesting. I Would Feel That I Had Committed So Many Things To The Paper That I Couldn't Easily Undo Because One Thing Leads To The Next, The Interconnectedness, The Sequences Would Make It Very Hard To Change Something That Simply Didn't Work.

I Kind Of Build A Novel The Way Marine Polyps Build A Coral Reef, It's Millions And Millions Of Little Precarious Bodies Stacked On One Another. And In My Case, That's Thousands Of Minutes I Go Through To Get From One Scene To The Next And Build It That Way.

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

I'm Either A Mutant Or A Cripple, And I Refuse To Be A Cripple. People Pity Cripples, But They're Afraid Of Mutants [...] Fear Implies Respect.

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.

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