Dean Koontz

Please don’t send the bestselling author jars of fish – it’s a bit creepy.

- Dean Koontz

Describe the room in which you write.

It’s 22’ by 20’, with a built-in U-shaped Art Deco desk, each arm of which is 10 feet long, plus one long wall of waist-high Art Deco cabinets, all of golden anigre with a piano finish. One large 19thcentury black-and-gold Chinese sideboard depicting a garden scene. Art Deco bronzes, but also 12 Han Dynasty fired-clay dogs, some a foot tall, others three feet. I love the contrast of the ancient and modern. Knowing that people as long as 2,000 years ago loved their dogs gives me a sense of the continuity of civilisation and of the human-dog bond.

Do you have any personal mementos on your desk?

A photo taken at another child’s birthday party shows my wife Gerda and me sitting across from each other at a table. We didn’t meet again until I was 18 and she was 17. Now we’ve been married 55 years! In numerous ways that would take a thousand words to describe, that photo suggests the workings of destiny.