David Jacob Knight > Quotes

“That's how they work, though. They don't try to convince you of anything. They make you doubt what you know. Make you jump to the wrong conclusions yourself.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“He woke up hours later, head on his desk. Ben went and dragged a blanket out of Owen's room. He stopped by the closet for a second to hear his son breathing in the dark.
At Owen's age, Ben was still living in Iowa and had lived there most of his life. He was twenty years old before he ever saw the ocean.
Owen's breathing always reminded him of the distant sea and deep restful nights at the beach house. Tonight, it just reminded him of breathing.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“The problem with true evil is that the normal human mind cannot properly fathom it," Randy said, making Ben drop one of the books; he pretended to be shelving the other one.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“... I know for a fact that the creative mind is only truly happy when it's tortured.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“Ben chuffed and continued to stare into the mirror. It was crazy, treating himself this way just to finish a book. The agent had been right. He probably would end up writing about this from a prison cell, or wherever he ended up. Because, as the agent had said, writers exploited pain.
Especially their own.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“He was a pen, and the ink just flowed through him.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“The agent sighed. „Mr. Little, do you know why horror novels usually revolve around the protagonist and his family?“
Ben didn't encourage him. It turned out the New Yorker didn't need it.
„Because horror is at its best when the stakes are intimate. There are no higher stakes than the people you love.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“... Ben wished, as he wished when he was a child, that he could be out there in the fields running free and far away from the dark little room in his mind.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“Where do you get your stories?" the interviewer asked. It was a typical question.
Ben had answered it himself once. He believed that writers gathered sensory data from dreams and experiences, and then in the imagination all that information stirred up like celestial dust into giant pillars of creation, where all that data bonded together into characters, settings, an entire universe.
Fleischer, however, believed that stories came from a much different place. He believed that all good wrtiers were simply tools for a greater force.
"Call it the Muse, call it Gan, call it God, or whatever you want. I personally don't have a name for it. But you know you're in it's grip when the story just flows through you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. At that point... you're just a pen.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“Ben looked around at the few people staring at him, and he realized, not for the first time, how alone he was in all of this.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“He didn't know why he was poking holes anyway. It was just that, with what he'd been through, any old coincidence had started to smell like a conspiracy.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“All my stories, everyone was a liar. Evevn good people. They all had secrets they were keeping. But good folks can get hurt operating on the assumption that something's true, or it they don't have all the information. So I just wanted to tell you, just from my own experience... don't keep things from your wife. Don't lie. That's the worst thing you could do right now.”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name

“A car pulled into the driveway.
Ben saw who it was and upgraded his "crap" to "oh shit".”
― David Jacob Knight, The Pen Name