Dean Koontz discusses Chesterton's influence on him

An excerpt from a three-page interview which bestselling author Dean Koontz gave to Gilbert Magazine (December 2009)
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GM: You have talked elsewhere about Chesterton. What was the first Chesterton book you read and how did it influence you?

DK: Orthodoxy, and it had a powerful effect. Then I read The Everlasting Man, which I think was the better of the two. Together they were like a one-two punch.


GM: What role did Chesterton play in your decision to become Catholic?

DK: I actually converted early, when I was about nineteen or twenty. I found Chesterton a couple of decades later, and he had a profound role. There is a deep and rigorous intellectual community and background in the Church, and Chesterton was the ideal of that, following the initial appeal of faith.


GM: Has Chesterton's precision of language influenced your writing?

DK: The precision of his language, the clarity of his thought, his exuberant nature, and his delight in tweaking the humorless who are humorless because of their dour materialism- all of those things influenced my writing. I just finished a novel titled Breathless, which comes out in November and opens with a Chesterton quote.