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Good Writing Is Often About Letting Go Of Fear And Affectation. Affectation Itself, Beginning With The Need To Define Some Sorts Of Writing As 'good' And Other Sorts As 'bad' Is Fearful Behavior.

-Stephen King

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Good Writing Is Often

Stephen King

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Good Writing Is Often About Letting Go Of Fear And Affectation. Affectation Itself, Beginning With The Need To Define Some Sorts Of Writing As 'good' And Other Sorts As 'bad' Is Fearful Behavior.

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As It Happened, All Three Of Us Turned Out To Be Real Writers--a Coincidence Almost Too Large To Be Termed Mere Coincidence In A Society Where Literally Tens Of Thousands (maybe Hundreds Of Thousands) Of College Students Aspire To The Writer's Trade And Where Bare Hundreds Actually Break Through.

She Ran Out Of Her Marriage The Way A Woman Can Run Out Of A Pair Of Sandals When She Decides To Let Go And Really Dash.

Kindle, Isn’t It?” The Waitress Asked. “i Got One For Christmas, And I Love It. I’m Reading My Way Through All Of Jodi Picoult’s Books.” “oh, Probably Not All Of Them,” Wesley Said. “huh? Why Not?” “she’s Probably Got Another One Done Already. That’s All I Meant.” “and James Patterson’s Probably Written One Since He Got Up This Morning!” She Said, And Went Off Chortling.

Resistance To Change Is Proportional To How Much The Future Might Be Altered By Any Given Act.

Terrifying. . . . A Dark Matter Is Populated With Vivid, Sympathetic Characters, And Driven By Terrors Both Human And Supernatural. It's The Kind Of Book That's Impossible To Put Down Once It Has Been Picked Up. It Kept Me Reading Far Into The Night. Straub Builds Otherworldly Terror Without Ever Losing Touch With His Attractive Cast Of Youngsters, Who Age Beautifully. Put This One High On Your List.

At Nineteen, It Seems To Me, One Has A Right To Be Arrogant; Time Has Usually Not Begun Its Stealthy And Rotten Subtractions. It Takes Away Your Hair And Your Jump-shot, According To A Popular Country Song, But In Truth It Takes Away A Lot More Than That.

In The End We Always Wear Out Our Worries. That’s What Wireman Says.

A Person's Memory Is Everything, Really. Memory Is Identity. It's You.

The Low Bird Is Not Picked Tenderly Out Of The Dust By Its Fellows; Rather, It Is Dispatched Quickly And Without Mercy.

The Dream Didn't Fade As Dreams Usually Do Upon Waking.

I Think The Best Writers Are Voracious Readers Who Pick Up The Cadences And The Feel Of Narration Through A Number Of Different Books. And You Begin By Maybe Copying The Style Of Writers That Really Knocked You Out.

Guys, Gals, Now Hear This: No One Wants To Take Away Your Hunting Rifles. No One Wants To Take Away Your Shotguns. No One Wants To Take Away Your Revolvers, And No One Wants To Take Away Your Automatic Pistols, As Long As Said Pistols Hold No More Than Ten Rounds. If You Can't Kill A Home Invader (or Your Wife, Up In The Middle Of The Night To Get A Snack From The Fridge) With Ten Shots, You Need To Go Back To The Local Shooting Range.

When The Time Is Gone, You Can Never Get It Back.

The Exhilaration Was Hard To Explain. It Was A Lonely Feeling — A Somehow Melancholy Feeling. He Was Outside; He Passed On The Wings Of The Wind, And None Of The People Beyond The Brightly Lighted Squares Of Their Windows Saw Him. They Were Inside, Inside Where There Was Light And Warmth. They Didn't Know He Had Passed Them; Only He Knew. It Was A Secret Thing.

I Choose To Believe In God Because It Makes Things Better.

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I Watched Titanic When I Got Back Home From The Hospital, And Cried. I Knew That My Iq Had Been Damaged.

...you Need Openness And Inability To Do Anything Other Than Get To The Point.

I Don't Want To Speak Too Disparagingly Of My Generation (actually I Do, We Had A Chance To Change The World But Opted For The Home Shopping Network Instead).

There May Be Fairies, There May Be Elves, But God Helps Those Who Help Themselves.

I've Given Up Thinking - It Keeps Getting Me Into Trouble.

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She Is A Cat With A Burning Tail, An Ant Under A Microscope, A Fly About To Lose Its Wings To The Curious Plucking Fingers Of A Third-grader On A Rainy Day, A Game For Bored Children With No Bodies And The Whole Universe At Their Feet.

I Believe There Is An Unseen World All Around Us.

...it Was More Like Bleeding Than Crying.

And She Sees That The Moonlight Is Losing Its Orange Glow. It Has Become Buttery, And Will Soon Turn To Silver.

A Broken Spoon May Be A Fork In Disguise.

So What He Supposed To Do? Grab Bobbie's Ax And Make Like Jack Nicholson In The Shinning? He Could See It. Smash, Crash, Bash: Heeeeeeere's Gardener!

If You Don't Have The Time To Read, You Don't Have The Time Or The Tools To Write.

The Writer Must Have A Good Imagination To Begin With, But The Imagination Has To Be Muscular, Which Means It Must Be Exercised In A Disciplined Way, Day In And Day Out, By Writing, Failing, Succeeding And Revising.

It's Up To Men To Build Things ... It's Up To God To Blow Them Down.

There Are All Sorts Of Dream Interpretations, Freud's Being The Most Notorious, But I Have Always Believed They Served A Simple Eliminatory Function, And Not Much More - That Dreams Are The Psyche's Way Of Taking A Good Dump Every Now And Then.

I'm One Of Those People Who Doesn't Really Know What He Thinks Until He Writes It Down.

If There's One American Belief I Hold Above All Others, It's That Those Who Would Set Themselves Up In Judgment On Matters Of What Is "right" And What Is "best" Should Be Given No Rest; That They Should Have To Defend Their Behavior Most Stringently. ... As A Nation, We've Been Through Too Many Fights To Preserve Our Rights Of Free Thought To Let Them Go Just Because Some Prude With A Highlighter Doesn't Approve Of Them

Dead Fields Under A November Sky, Scattered Rose Petals Brown And Turning Up At The Edges, Empty Pools Scummed With Algae, Rot, Decomposition, Dust.

We Like To Think About How Smart We Are. But I Think Talent As A Writer Is Hard-wired In, It's All There, At Least The Basic Elements Of It. You Can't Change It Any More Than You Can Choose Whether To Be Right Handed Or Left Handed.

Time Takes It All, Whether You Want It To Or Not.

You Don't Always Talk With Your Mouth. Sometimes What You Say With Your Mouth Hardly Matters At All. You Have To Signify

A Cloud-congested Caul That Is Alternately Red, Orange, Vermilion, Purple. Sometimes The Clouds Break Apart In Great, Slow Rafts, Letting Through Beams Of Innocent Yellow Sunlight That Are Bitterly Nostalgic For The Summer That Has Gone By.

I've Always Believed In God. I Also Think That's The Sort Of Thing That Either Comes As Part Of The Equipment, The Capacity To Believe, Or At Some Point In Your Life, When You're In A Position Where You Actually Need Help From A Power Greater Than Yourself, You Simply Make An Agreement.

He Remembered Waking Up Once, Listening To The Wind, Thinking Of All The Dark And Rushing Cold Outside And All The Warmth Of This Bed, Filled With Their Peaceful Heat Under Two Quilts, And Wishing It Could Be Like This Forever.

The Age Of The Book Is Not Over. No Way... But Maybe The Age Of Some Books Is Over. People Say To Me Sometimes 'steve, Are You Ever Going To Write A Straight Novel, A Serious Novel' And By That They Mean A Novel About College Professors Who Are Having Impotence Problems Or Something Like That. And I Have To Say Those Things Just Don't Interest Me. Why? I Don't Know. But It Took Me About Twenty Years To Get Over That Question, And Not Be Kind Of Ashamed About What I Do, Of The Books I Write.

I Wouldn't Have Missed A Single Minute Of It, Not For The Whole World.

Adults Are The Real Monsters.

Speaking Personally, You Can Have My Gun, But You'll Take My Book When You Pry My Cold, Dead Fingers Off Of The Binding.

Once, During The Drinking Phase, Wendy Had Accused Him Of Desiring His Own Destruction But Not Possessing The Necessary Moral Fiber To Support A Full-blown Deathwish. So He Manufactured Ways In Which Other People Could Do It, Lopping A Piece At A Time Off Himself And Their Family.

Sooner Or Later Everything You Thought You'd Left Behind Comes Around Again. For Good Or Ill, It Comes Around Again.

Sooner Or Later

Love, The Simplest, Strongest, And Most Unforgiving Of All Emotions.

In Small Towns People Scent The Wind With Noses Of Uncommon Keenness.

I'd Been Raised By My Parents To Believe Barfing Your Feelings On Other People Was The Height Of Impoliteness.

The Devil's Voice Is Sweet To Hear.

You Can't Deny Laughter; When It Comes, It Plops Down In Your Favorite Chair And Stays As Long As It Wants.

Successful Rebellions Always Begin In Secret.

A Slice Of Pie Without Cheese Is Like A Kiss Without A Squeeze.

I Don't Take Notes; I Don't Outline, I Don't Do Anything Like That. I Just Flail Away At The Goddamn Thing. I'm A Salami Writer. I Try To Write Good Salami, But Salami Is Salami. You Can't Sell It As Caviar.

Nightmares Exist Outside Of Logic, And There's Little Fun To Be Had In Explanations; They're Antithetical To The Poetry Of Fear.

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