Art & Creativity Quote by Peter Straub

Straub’s joke has a blade in it: he’s defending a stylistic choice by pretending it’s just a slightly nerdy preference. The “maybe” and “probably” are doing social work here, softening what could sound like a manifesto. He’s not merely saying he writes long sentences; he’s implying that contemporary norms - especially in genre fiction, where Straub made his name - often police sentence length as if clarity and speed were moral virtues. Name-dropping Henry James is a sly way to reframe the whole argument: long sentences aren’t indulgence, they’re lineage.

The intent is partly mischievous self-positioning. James stands for syntactic patience, psychological depth, and the idea that consciousness doesn’t arrive in clean declarative chunks. By aligning himself with James, Straub claims permission to let a sentence think on the page, to linger in perception and qualification. At the same time, it’s a little bit of a flex: Straub signals that he’s reading “up” the ladder, that his horror and dark fantasy aren’t ashamed of the high-literary bloodstream running through them.

The subtext is also defensive, and culturally specific. Writers are routinely coached to trim, tighten, simplify - advice that can become dogma in workshops and publishing. Straub counters with taste as alibi: if you object to the sentence, you might just be revealing what you don’t read. It’s a polite insult wrapped in an offhand confession, the kind of line that keeps the conversation genial while quietly winning it.