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I Write About Things That Scare Me. I've Never Written A Snake Story In My Life. I Myself Have Never Written A Story About Snakes Because They Don't Scare Me. I Write About Rats Because They Scare The Hell Out Of Me.

-Stephen King

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I Write About Things

Stephen King

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I Write About Things That Scare Me. I've Never Written A Snake Story In My Life. I Myself Have Never Written A Story About Snakes Because They Don't Scare Me. I Write About Rats Because They Scare The Hell Out Of Me.

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Semi-automatic S Have Only Two Purposes. One Is So Owners Can Take Them To The Shooting Range Once In A While, Yell Yeehaw, And Get All Horny At The Rapid Fire And The Burning Vapor Spurting From The End Of The Barrel. Their Other Use-their Only Other Use-is To Kill People.

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Don't Wait For The Muse. As I've Said, He's A Hardheaded Guy Who's Not Susceptible To A Lot Of Creative Fluttering. This Isn't The Ouija Board Or The Spirit-world We're Talking About Here, But Just Another Job Like Laying Pipe Or Driving Long-haul Trucks. Your Job Is To Make Sure The Muse Knows Where You're Going To Be Every Day From Nine 'til Noon. Or Seven 'til Three. If He Does Know, I Assure You That Sooner Or Later He'll Start Showing Up.

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I Started Off Thinking Eminem Was A Flash In The Pan, A Kind Of Hip-hop Hanson Brother. How Wrong I Was. Recovery Is Sometimes Funny, Sometimes Terrible, Always Painfully Honest. The Matching Of Eminem And Rihanna On "love The Way You Lie" Is Pure Genius. "not Afraid" Is Pretty Great Too.

Do You Believe In An Afterlife?" The Gunslinger Asked Him As Brown Dropped Three Ears Of Hot Corn Onto His Plate. Brown Nodded. "i Think This Is It.

I Think Telling Stories Is Like Pushing Something. Pushing Against Uncreation Itself, Maybe.

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The Three Is Really Wonderful. A Mix Of Michael Crichton And Shirley Jackson, Hard To Put Down And Vastly Entertaining.

Sometimes When You're Young, You Have Moments Of Such Happiness, You Think You're Living On Someplace Magical, Like Atlantis Must Have Been. Then We Grow Up And Our Hearts Break Into Two.

All Thing Serve The Beam

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.

The Dream Might Have Been More Than A Dream. It Was As If A Door In The Wall Of Reality Had Come Ajar... And Now All Sorts Of Unwelcome Things Were Flying Through.

It Was As Hysterical As A Woman Having A Hot Flash.

The Tower. He Would Come To The Dark Tower And There He Would Sing Their Names; There He Would Sing Their Names; There He Would Sing All Their Names. The Sun Stained The East A Dusky Rose, And At Last Roland, No Longer The Last Gunslinger But One Of The Last Three, Slept And Dreamed His Angry Dreams Through Which There Ran Only That One Soothing Blue Thread: There I Will Sing All Their Names!

We Fall From Womb To Tomb, From One Blackness And Toward Another, Remembering Little Of The One And Knowing Nothing Of The Other ... Except Through Faith.

Knowing Nothing

I Love You Too Much To Lie To You, Lisey. I Love You With All That Passes For My Heart. I Suspect That Kind Of All-out Love Becomes A Burden To A Woman In Time, But It's The Only Kind I Have To Give. I Think We're Going To Be Quite A Wealthy Couple In Terms Of Money, But I'll Almost Certainly Be An Emotional Pauper All My Life. I've Got The Money Coming, But As For The Rest I've Got Just Enough For You, And I Won't Ever Dirty Or Dilute It With Lies. Not With The Words I Say, Not With The Ones I Hold Back.

She Couldn't Be On His Wavelength All The Time. That's All. When You Could Recognize That And Deal With It, You Were On Your Way To An Adult Relationship.

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The First Is That Good Writing Consists Of Mastering The Fundamentals (vocabulary, Grammar, The Elements Of Style) And Then Filling The Third Level Of Your Toolbox With The Right Instruments. The Second Is That While It Is Impossible To Make A Competent Writer Out Of A Bad Writer, And While Is Equally Impossible To Make A Great Writer Out Of A Good One, It Is Possible, With Lots Of Hard Work, Dedication, And Timely Help, To Make A Good Writer Out Of A Merely Competent One

Sometimes The Things Presented To Us As Choices Aren't Choices At All.

Don't Look Back, Never Look Back. How Often Do People Tell Themselves That After An Experience That Is Exceptionally Good (or Exceptionally Bad?)? Often, I Suppose. And The Advice Usually Goes Unheeded. Humans Were Built To Look Back; That's Why We Have Tat Swivel Joint In Our Necks.

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Was It Pretty? Your Country. . .your Land?" "it Was Beautiful," The Gunslinger Said. "there Were Fields And Forests And Rivers And Mists In The Morning. But That's Only Pretty. My Mother Used To Say That The Only Real Beauty Is Order And Love And Light.

Panic Is Highly Contagious, Especially In Situations When Nothing Is Known And Everything Is In Flux.

They're Animals, All Right. But Why Are You So Goddam Sure That Makes Us Human Beings?

...belief Has A Second Edge. If There Are Ten Thousand Medieval Peasants Who Create Vampires By Believing Them Real, There May Be One - Probably A Child - Who Will Imagine The Stake Necessary To Kill It. But A Stake Is Only Stupid Wood; The Mind Is The Mallet Which Drives It Home.

If You Don't Have Time To Read, You Don't Have The Time (or The Tools) To Write. Simple As That.

Outlines Are The Last Resource Of Bad Fiction Writers Who Wish To God They Were Writing Masters' Theses.

Life Is Fair. We All Get The Same Nine-month Shake In The Box, And Then The Dice Roll. Some People Get A Run Of Sevens. Some People, Unfortunately, Get Snake-eyes. Its Just How The World Is.

Do I Know What People Say? Sure. I Shrug It Off. What Else Can You Do? Stop People From Talking? You Might As Well Try To Stop The Wind From Blowing.

The Idea That The Creative Endeavor And Mind-altering Substances Are Entwined Is One Of The Great Pop-intellectual Myths Of Our Time. Substance Abusing Writers Are Just Substance Abusers — Common Garden Variety Drunks And Druggies, In Other Words. Any Claims That The Drugs And Alcohol Are Necessary To Dull A Finer Sensibility Are Just The Usual Self-serving Bullshit. I've Heard Alcoholic Snowplow Drivers Make The Same Claim, That They Drink To Still The Demons.

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I Win, You Win. You Win, I Win. The Gun, I Win. The Fruit, You Win. I Win, You Win.

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Human Nature Baby, Grab It And Growl.

After The 9/11 Apocalypse Happened In New York City, People, Particularly New Yorkers, Who Breathed In The Ash, Or Saw The Results Of That, Have A Tendency To Keep Seeing Echoes And Having Flashbacks To It.

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You Needn't Die Happy When Your Time Comes, But You Must Die Satisfied, For You Have Lived Your Life From The Beginning To The End And Ka Is Always Served.

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We Lie Best When We Lie To Ourselves.

It Hurt, Of Course, But More Often Than Not The Best Things Do, I've Found.

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He Thrusts His Fists Against The Posts And Still Insists He Sees The Ghosts.

The World Had Moved On And All That Was Over, Done Before Fairly Begun.

For Men, I Think, Love Is A Thing Formed Of Equal Parts Lust And Astonishment. The Astonishment Part Women Understand. The Lust Part They Only Think They Understand.

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Writing Is Seduction. Good Talk Is Part Of Seduction. If Not So, Why Do So Many Couples Who Start The Evening At Dinner Wind Up In Bed?

When You Own A Piano, It's Harder To Think About Moving.

Even The Company Of The Mad Was Better Than The Company Of The Dead.

No One Can Be As Intellectually Slothful As A Really Smart Person

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A Coward Judges All He Sees By What He Is.

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The Mystery Of The Universe Is Not Time But Size.

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I Never Have A Thematic Intention At The Outset.

Every Book You Pick Up Has Its Own Lesson Or Lessons, And Quite Often The Bad Books Have More To Teach Than The Good Ones.

Such An Ego Simply Forbade Certain Lines Of Thought.

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It Wasn't Just Love That Held People Together. There Was Secrets, And The Price You Paid To Keep Them.

Do You Need Someone To Make You A Paper Badge With The Word Writer On It Before You Can Believe You Are One? God I Hope Not.

But This Wealth Of Information Produced Little Or No Insight.

Most Books About Writing Are Filled With Bullshit. Fiction Writers, Present Company Included, Don’t Understand Very Much About What They Do—not Why It Works When It’s Good, Not Why It Doesn’t When It’s Bad.

Sure, We Need The Gypsies. We Always Have. Because If You Don't Have Someone To Run Out Of Town Once In A While, How Are You Going To Know You Yourself Belong There?

But Then Fall Comes, Kicking Summer Out On Its Treacherous Ass As It Always Does One Day Sometime After The Midpoint Of September, It Stays Awhile Like An Old Friend That You Have Missed. It Settles In The Way An Old Friend Will Settle Into Your Favorite Chair And Take Out His Pipe And Light It And Then Fill The Afternoon With Stories Of Places He Has Been And Things He Has Done Since Last He Saw You.

Stories Are Like Relics, Part Of An Undiscovered Preexisting World. The Writer's Job Is To Use The Tools In His Or Her Toolbox To Get As Much Of Each One Out Of The Ground Intact As Possible.

Americans Are Apocalyptic By Nature. The Reason Why Is That We've Always Had So Much, So We Live In Deadly Fear That People Are Going To Take It Away From Us.

Lightning Flashed Dully Inside The Clouds On The Horizon Making Them Look As If They Had Fireflies Of Their Own, Monster Fireflies The Size Of Dinosaurs.

But Writers Invite Ghosts, Maybe; Along With Actors And Artists, They Are The Only Totally Accepted Mediums Of Our Society. They Make Worlds That Never Were, Populate Them With People Who Never Existed, And Then Invite Us To Join Them In Their Fantasies. And We Do It, Don't We? Yes. We Pay To Do It.

The Quickest Way To Learn About A New Place Is To Know What It Dreams Of.

Paul Lepage Has Become A Terrible Embarrassment To The State I Live In And Love. If He Won't Govern, He Should Resign.

If You Can Remember All The Accessories That Go With Your Best Outfit, The Contents Of Your Purse, The Starting Lineup Of The New York Yankees Or The Houston Oilers, Or What Label "hang On Sloopy" By The Mccoys Was On, You Are Capable Of Remembering The Differences Between A Gerund (verb Form Used As A Noun) And A Participle (verb Form Used As An Adjective).

Let's Get One Thing Clear Right Now, Shall We? There Is No Idea Dump, No Story Central, No Island Of The Buried Bestsellers; Good Story Ideas Seem To Come Quite Literally From Nowhere, Sailing At You Right Out Of The Empty Sky: Two Previously Unrelated Ideas Come Together And Make Something New Under The Sun. Your Job Isn't To Find These Ideas But To Recognize Them When They Show Up.

It's Strange How Pain Marks Our Faces, And Makes Us Look Like Family.

One Night When My Longing For Her Was Like A Fire Burning Out Of Control In My Heart And My Head, I Wrote Her A Letter That Just Seemed To Go On And On. I Poured Out My Whole Heart In It, Never Looking Back To See What I'd Said Because I Was Afraid Cowardice Would Make Me Stop. I Didn't Stop, And When A Voice In My Head Clamored That It Would Be Madness To Mail Such A Letter, That I Would Be Giving Her My Naked Heart To Hold In Her Hand, I Ignored It With A Child's Breathless Disregard Of The Consequences.

It's A Writer's Job To Carve With Language, To Hew Close To The Bone.

Love Among The Ruins... I'll Tell You Something, My Friend: Weird Love's Better Than No Love At All.

I Don't Have Anything Against Either Of The Dead Movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, None Of Those Movies. If It Scares Somebody, I Think That It Is Serving A Valid Purpose. It Is Doing What The Filmmaker Intended. But, It Is Not Something That You Hand To Kids.

Stephenie Meyer Can’t Write Worth A Darn. She’s Not Very Good.

I Like To End Stories Where The Readers Have A Little Room To Run. They Can Resolve Things As They Like In Their Own Mind.

That Was What I Wanted, But I Don't Need It To Be Gone. I Can Love You And I Can Love Life And Bear The Pain All At The Same Time. I Think The Pain Might Even Make The Rest Better, The Way A Good Setting Can Make A Diamond Look Better.

I Started After Him...and The Clown Looked Back. I Saw Its Eyes, And All At Once I Understood Who It Was." "who Was It, Don?" Harold Gardner Asked Softly. "it Was Derry," Don Hagarty Said. "it Was This Town.

Life Is A Wheel, And If You Wait Long Enough, It Always Comes Back Around To Where It Started.

I Start Work Around 8 A.m. And Usually Finish Around Noon. If There's More To Do, I Do It In The Late Afternoon, Although That Isn't Prime Time For Me.

And You May Make Revelations That Cost You Dearly Only To Have People Look At You In A Funny Way, Not Understanding What You've Said At All, Or Why You Thought It Was So Important That You Almost Cried While You Were Saying It.

Drive Away And Try To Keep Smiling. Get A Little Rock And Roll On The Radio And Go Toward Life With All The Courage You Can Find And All The Belief You Can Muster. Be True, Be Brave, Stand.

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Thin Clouds Form, And The Shadows Lengthen Out. They Have No Breadth, As Summer Shadows Have; There Are No Leaves On The Trees Or Fat Clouds In The Sky To Make Them Thick. They Are Gaunt, Mean Shadows That Bite The Ground Like Teeth. As The Sun Nears The Horizon, Its Benevolent Yellow Begins To Deepen, To Become Infected, Until It Glares An Angry Inflamed Orange. It Throws A Variegated Glow Over The Horizon.

Do They See The Lethal Insanity Of A Race To The Brink Of Oblivion, And Then Over The Edge? Apparently Not. If They Did, Surely They Wouldn't Be Racing To Begin With. Or Is It A Simple Failure Of Imagination? One Doesn't Like To Think Such A Rudimentary Failing Could Bring About The End, Yet...

I Just Didn't Want Her To Get Hurt. I Thought She Was Going To Be. But Everyone Gets Their Share, Don't They? Sure. Pow, In The Nose. Pow, In The Eye. Pow, Below The Belt, Down You Go, And The Ref Just Went Out For A Hot Dog.

My Childhood Was Pretty Ordinary, Except From A Very Early Age, I Wanted To Be Scared. I Just Did. I Was Scared Afterwards. I Wanted A Light On, Because I Was Afraid That There Was Something In The Closet. My Imagination Was Very Active, Even At A Young Age.

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

Let The Word And The Legend Go Before You. Let The World Go Before You. Let Your Shadow Grow. Let It Grow Hair On Its Face. Let It Become Dark. Given Time, Words May Even Enchant An Enchanter.

Gordie: Do You Think I'm Weird? Chris: Definitely. Gordie: No Man, Seriously. Am I Weird? Chris: Yeah, But So What? Everybody's Weird

I’m Not Particularly Keen On Writing Which Exhaustively Describes The Physical Characteristics Of The People In The Story And What They’re Wearing… I Can Always Get A J. Crew Catalogue… …so Spare Me, If You Please, The Hero’s ‘sharply Intelligent Blue Eyes’ And ‘outthrust Determined Chin’.

Like Anything Else That Happens On Its Own, The Act Of Writing Is Beyond Currency. Money Is Great Stuff To Have, But When It Comes To The Act Of Creation, The Best Thing Is Not To Think Of Money Too Much. It Constipates The Whole Process.

Stop Now Before I Kill You A Word To The Wise From Your Friend Pennywise

I Don't Want You To Apologize For Being Rich; I Want You To Acknowledge That In America, We All Should Have To Pay Our Fair Share.

The Crazy People Of The World...shouldn't Get To Win. If God Won't Make It Better After They Do Have Their Shitty Little Victories, Then Ordinary People Have To. They Have To Try, At Least.

I Do Have One Slightly Crooked Wheel Upstairs, But Everything Else Is Ticking Along Just Four-o, Thank You Very Much.

I Was Sitting One Day And Thinking About Cannibalism, Because That's What Guys Like Me Do... And I Thought, Suppose A Guy Was Washed Up On A Rocky Island, How Much Of Himself Could He Eat?

There's Something In Us That Is Very Much Attracted To Madness. Everyone Who Looks Off The Edge Of A Tall Building Has Felt At Least A Faint, Morbid Urge To Jump. And Anyone Who Has Ever Put A Loaded Pistol Up To His Head... All Right, My Point Is This: Even The Most Well-adjusted Person Is Holding Onto His Or Her Sanity By A Greased Rope. I Really Believe That. The Rationality Circuits Are Shoddily Built Into The Human Animal.

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.

This Is A Short Book Because Most Books About Writing Are Filled With Bullshit.

If You're Going Into A Very Dark Place, Then You Should Take A Bright Light, And Shine It On Everything. If You Don't Want To See, Why In God's Name Would You Dare The Dark At All?

It Occured To Her That Pleasure, No Matter How Deep, Was A Ghostly, Ephemeral Thing. Love Might Make The World Go Round, But She Was Convinced It Ws The Cries Of The Badly Wounded Andf Deeply Afflicted Which Spun The Universe On The Great Glass Pole Of It's Axis.

Working On A New Idea Is Kind Of Like Getting Married. Then A New Idea Comes Along And You Think, 'man, I'd Really Like To Go Out With Her.' But You Can't. At Least Not Until The Old Idea Is Finished.

Rightly Tired Of The Pain İ Hear And Feel, Boss... Where We's Comin From Or Goin To Or Why... If İ Could End It, İ Would. But İ Can't.

Description Is What Makes The Reader A Sensory Participant In The Story.

When You Stack Up All The Years We Are Allowed Against All There Is To Read, Time Is Very Short Indeed.

For Me, Good Description Usually Consists Of A Few Well-chosen Details That Will Stand For Everything Else.

The Book Is Not The Important Part. The Book Is The Delivery System. The Important Part Is The Story And The Talent.

No One Can Tell What Goes On In Between The Person You Were And The Person You Become. No One Can Chart That Blue And Lonely Section Of Hell. There Are No Maps Of The Change. You Just Come Out The Other Side. Or You Don't.

The World, Although Well-lighted With Fluorescents And Incandescent Bulbs And Neon, Is Still Full Of Odd Dark Corners And Unsettling Nooks And Crannies.

Life's Simplest Answers Are Often The Easiest To Overlook.

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