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She Did Not Know If Her Gift Came From The Lord Of Light Or Of Darkness, And Now, Finally Finding That She Didn't Care Which, She Wad Overcome With Almost Indescribable Relief, As If A Huge Weight, Long Carried, Had Slipped From Her Shoulders.

-Stephen King

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She Did Not Know

Stephen King

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She Did Not Know If Her Gift Came From The Lord Of Light Or Of Darkness, And Now, Finally Finding That She Didn't Care Which, She Wad Overcome With Almost Indescribable Relief, As If A Huge Weight, Long Carried, Had Slipped From Her Shoulders.

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Above, The Stars Shone Hard And Bright, Sparks Struck Off The Dark Skin Of The Universe.

I'm Afraid Of All Kinds Of Things. I'm Afraid Of Failing At Whatever Story I'm Writing - That It Won't Come Up For Me, Or That I Won't Be Able To Finish It.

God Is Cruel. Sometimes He Makes You Live.

I'm Still In Love With What I Do, With The Idea Of Making Things Up, So Hours When I Write Always Feel Like Very Blessed Hours To Me.

There's A Saying - "write What You Know." It's Bad Advice If You Take It As An Unbreakable Rule, But Good Advice If You Use It As A Foundation.

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

Crying Was Like Pissing Everything Out On The Ground.

The Sun Was A Molten Coin Burning A Circle In The Low-hanging Overcast, Surrounded By A Fairy-ring Of Moisture.

I Felt Lonely And Content At The Same Time. I Believe That Is A Rare Kind Of Happiness.

Calling It A Simple Schoolgirl Crush Was Like Saying A Rolls-royce Was A Vehicle With Four Wheels, Something Like A Hay-wagon. She Did Not Giggle Wildly And Blush When She Saw Him, Nor Did She Chalk His Name On Trees Or Write It On The Walls Of The Kissing Bridge. She Simply Lived With His Face In Her Heart All The Time, A Kind Of Sweet, Hurtful Ache. She Would Have Died For Him.

Anger Is The Most Useless Emotion," Henchick Intoned, "destructive To The Mind And Hurtful To The Heart.

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.

The Death Of The Music Business Was Insane, But Audio Recordings Have Been Around Now For Maybe 120 Years. Books Have Been Around For, What, Nine Centuries? So They're More Entrenched Than Music.

Teddy, Vern, Chris: I Don't Shut Up. I Grow Up. And When I Look At You, I Throw Up. Aghhh! Gordie: And Then Your Mom Goes Around The Corner And She Licks It Up.

You Cannot Condemn A Man For What May Only Be A Figment Of Your Own Imagination.

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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.

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Upon Being Asked By A Fan How To Become A Writer, Stephen King Replied, "write.

Cut Him. Cut Him While I Stand Here And Watch. I Want To See The Blood Flow. Don't Make Me Tell You Twice.

As Always At These Times When He Felt Really In Need Of God The Front Of His Mind Was Serene, But The Deeper Part, Where Faith Did Constant Battle With Doubt, Was Terrified That There Would Be No Answer.

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.

Mornings Belong To Whatever Is New; The Current Composition. Afternoons Are For Naps And Letters.

Only Library Books Speak With Such Wordless Eloquence Of The Power Good Stories Hold Over Us.

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And I Believe Happiness Is The Exact Opposite Of Sadness, Bitterness, And Hatred: Happiness Should Remain Unexamined As Long As Possible.

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By Its Very Nature, Film Is Supposed To Be An Accessible Medium To Everybody.

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And If You Are Honest About The Words Coming Out Of Your Characters' Mouths, You'll Find That You've Let Yourself In For A Fair Amount Of Criticism.

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

I Can't Lie And Say There Are No Bad Writers. Sorry, But There Are Lots Of Bad Writers.

I Tend To Scare Myself.

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He Found Himself Still With Too Many Questions And Not Enough Answers.

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Showrunning Is A Thing Where You Have To Work With Tons Of Different People. You Have To Schmooze People, You Have To Talk To Network People. I Don't Want To Do Any Of That.

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We Fool Ourselves So Much We Could Do It For A Living.

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Listening To It Was Like Having A Mud-slimed Piece Of Silk Drawn Lightly Back And Forth Across Her Face.

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

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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.

Time Continued To Pass - The Oldest Trick In The World, And Maybe The Only One That Really Is Magic.

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.

We All Have A Tendency To Want Order In Our Lives. But Order Presupposes Authority, And Authority Presupposes, Sooner Or Later, That We'll All Need Hooves. It's Going To Happen Sooner Or Later, Isn't It? You Know It Is.

The Quiet, Singing Voice Of The Rose. The Song That Promised All Might Be Well, All Might Be Well, That All Manner Of Things Might Be Well.

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"you Need Hedges.""hedges," I Said, Bemused. "yes, Edgar." He Looked Surprised And A Little Disappointed, As If I Had Failed To Understand A Very Simple Concept. "hedges Against The Night."

It Had That Comfortably Sprung, Lived-in Look That Library Books With A Lively Circulation Always Get; Bent Page Corners, A Dab Of Mustard On Page 331, A Whiff Of Some Reader's Spilled After-dinner Whiskey On Page 468. Only Library Books Speak With Such Wordless Eloquence Of The Power Good Stories Hold Over Us, How Good Stories Abide, Unchanged And Mutely Wise, While We Poor Humans Grow Older And Slower.

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Dark Tower Series

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I Believe There Is An Unseen World All Around Us.

We Are Going To Fight. We Are Going To Be Hurt. And In The End, We Will Stand.

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At The Time We’re Stuck In It, Like Hostages Locked In A Turkish Bath, High School Seems The Most Serious Business In The World To Just About All Of Us. It’s Not Until The Second Or Third Class Reunion That We Start Realizing How Absurd The Whole Thing Was.

The Writer's Original Perception Of A Character Or Characters May Be As Erroneous As The Reader's.

You Know How It's Going To End, But Instead Of Spoiling Things, That Somehow Increases Your Fascination. It's Like Watching A Kid Run His Electric Train Faster And Faster And Waiting For It To Derail On One Of The Curves.

I Thought It Was Great Fun To Scare People. I Also Knew It Was Socially Acceptable Because There Were A Lot Of Horror Movies Out There.

The Past Is Obdurate. It Doesn't Want To Change.

Don't Let The Sun Go Down Without Saying Thank You To Someone, And Without Admitting To Yourself That Absolutely No One Gets This Far Alone.

Beating Heroin Is Child's Play Compared To Beating Your Childhood.

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.

So What, Ghosts Can't Hurt You. That's What I Thought Then.

It Didn´t Occur To Me Until Later That There´s Another Truth, Very Simple: Greed In A Good Cause Is Still Greed.

A Woman Who Would Steal Your Love When Your Love Was Really All You Had To Give Was Not Much Of A Woman.

If You're Just Starting Out As A Writer, You Could Do Worse Than Strip Your Television's Electric Plug-wire, Wrap A Spike Around It, And Then Stick It Back Into The Wall. See What Blows, And How Far. Just An Idea.

Belief In The Supernatural Or Belief In Wild Talents Like Precognition And Telepathy And Telekinesis And Things Like That, It Seems To Me That Belief In Those Things Is Just Very, Very Freeing.

Might As Well Try To Drink The Ocean With A Spoon As Argue With A Lover.

I Think It Is Beyond Doubt That H. P. Lovecraft Has Yet To Be Surpassed As The Twentieth Century's Greatest Practitioner Of The Classic Horror Tale.

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He Did It (listened) As The World's Most Charming And Magnetic People Do, Always Asking The Right Question At The Right Time, Never Fidgeting Or Taking His Eyes From The Speaker's Face, Making The Other Guy Feel Like The Most Knowledgeable, Brilliant, And Intellectually Savvy Person On The Planet.

I Am In Trouble Here. This Woman Is Not Right.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Adverbs.

" Science Is Beginning To Encroach On Every Level Of Our Volition". And To Me, That Is A Frightening Social Concept. It Doesn't Have Anything To Do With The Right To Have An Abortion Verses The Right To Life. It Has To Do With The Ability Of Science To Keep Things Alive And The Ability Of Science To Really Control Our Lives.

A Person’s Never Too Old For Stories. Man And Boy, Girl And Woman, We Live For Them. - Roland Deschain

We Sometimes Need To Create Unreal Monsters And Bogies To Stand In For All The Things We Fear In Our Real Lives.

It's "merry Christmas" At Our House. Whatever It Is At Yours, Have A Happy One. And Be Good To Somebody.

Jake Went In, Aware That He Had, For The First Time In Three Weeks, Opened A Door Without Hoping Madly To Find Another World On The Other Side. A Bell Jingled Overhead. The Mild, Spicy Smell Of Old Books Hit Him, And The Smell Was Somehow Like Coming Home.

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

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We're All Going To Die; I'm Just Trying To Make It A Little More Interesting.

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You Want To Remember That While You're Judging The Book, The Book Is Also Judging You.

Death Was No Less A Miracle Than Birth.

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When It Comes To Horror There's A Strange Need To Analyze. When "evil Children" Fad Happened, There Was The Exorcist And The Other And The Omen. People Would Say, "what This Really Means Is That Americans Don't Want To Have Kids Anymore. They Feel Hostility Towards Their Own Children. They Feel They're Being Tied Down And Dragged Down." In Fact, In Most Cases, What Those Books Are About Is Nice Children Who Are Beset By Forces Beyond Their Control.

A Short Story Is A Different Thing All Together - A Short Story Is Like A Kiss In The Dark From A Stranger.

Language Does Not Always Have To Wear A Tie And Lace-up Shoes. The Object Of Fiction Isn't Grammatical Correctness But To Make The Reader Welcome And Then Tell A Story... To Make Him/her Forget, Whenever Possible, That He/she Is Reading A Story At All.

Waiting Rooms Were Made For Books-of Course! But So Are Theater Lobbies Before The Show, Long And Boring Checkout Lines, And Everyone's Favorite, The John.

Sometimes There Is Absolutely No Difference At All Between Salvation And Damnation.

We Need Ghost Stories Because We, In Fact, Are The Ghosts.

Wow. This Makes Grand Central Look Like A Bus Stop In Buttfuck Nebraska.

It Was Not Fair, It Was Not Fair, It Was Not Fair. So Cried His Child's Heart, And Then His Child's Heart Died A Little. For That Is Also The Way Of The World.

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The Battle Between Good And Evil Is Endlessly Fascinating Because We Are Participants Every Day.

Memory Is The Basis Of Every Journey.

I Just Write About What I Feel I Want To Write About. I'm Like A Kid. I Get An Idea, And It's Like A Kid's Toy That You Push And Tug Around The Room. It's Fun, It's Bright, It's Pretty And Maybe It'll Go Clack-clack Or Whiz-whiz, Whatever It Happens To Do. I Like To Make Believe.

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.

In Many Ways, Eulah-beulah Prepared Me For Literary Criticism. After Having A Two-hundred-pound Babysitter Fart On Your Face And Yell Pow!, The Village Voice Holds Few Terrors.

Above All Else, Be Consistent.

There's One Novel, Cujo, That I Barely Remember Writing At All.

Talent Is A Dull Knife That Will Cut Nothing Unless It Is Wielded With Great Force.

If You Liked Being A Teenager, There's Something Really Wrong With You.

Being A Teenager

Your First Impulse Is To Share Good News, Your Second Is To Club Someone With It.

I Don't Want To Sound Like An Ad, A Public Service Ad On Tv, But The Fact Is If You Can Read, You Can Walk Into A Job Later On. If You Don't, Then You've Got, The Army, Iraq, I Don't Know, Something Like That. It's, It's Not As Bright. So, That's My Little Commercial For That.

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.

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.

Here I Am, Ninety Years Old And Ready For The Cooling Board, Using A Brand New Macintosh Computer, And There You Sit, Twenty-two And Gorgeous, Fresh As A New Peach, Yet Scrawling On A Yellow Legal Pad Like An Old Maid In A Victorian Romance.

I Love Crime, I Love Mysteries, And I Love Ghosts.

It Was Life, Often Unsatisfying, Frequently Cruel, Usually Boring, Sometimes Beautiful, Once In A While Exhilarating.

The Stories We Hear In Our Childhood Are The Ones We Remember All Our Lives.

Writing Isn't About Making Money, Getting Famous, Getting Dates, Getting Laid, Or Making Friends. In The End, It's About Enriching The Lives Of Those Who Will Read Your Work, And Enriching Your Own Life, As Well. It's About Getting Up, Getting Well, And Getting Over. Getting Happy, Okay? Getting Happy.

The Muses Are Ghosts, And Sometimes They Come Uninvited.

Perfect Paranoia Is Perfect Awareness.

By The Time I Was Fourteen The Nail In My Wall Would No Longer Support The Weight Of The Rejection Slips Impaled Upon It. I Replaced The Nail With A Spike And Went On Writing.

Our Memories Have Voices, Too. Often Sad Ones That Clamor Like Raised Arms In The Dark.

Kids Know They Can't Make It Alone, Yet At The Same Time, Built Into Each One Of Us, Is A Survival Ethic. It Says, "nobody Cares And You Have To Look Out For Yourself And If You Don't, You'll Die." These Two Things Work Against Each Other. I Think Most Kids Are Very Frightened Of Their Parents, And That's What All Fairy Tales Reflect: Parents Will Fail You And You'll Be Left On Your Own. But, Of Course, Everything Comes Out Right In The End And The Parents Take You Back.

It Is, After All, The Dab Of Grit That Seeps Into An Oyster's Shell That Makes The Pearl, Not Pearl-making Seminars With Other Oysters.

Sometimes An Accident Can Be An Unhappy Womans Best Friend

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.

...book-buyers Aren't Attracted, By And Large, By The Literary Merits Of A Novel: Book-buyers Want A Good Story...something That Will First Fascinate Them, Then Pull Them In And Keep Them Turning The Pages.

She Looks Like The Type That Might Freak Out. It's Something In The Eyes, Frannie. It Says If You Shoot My Sacred Cows, I'll Shoot Yours.

Semi-facetiously, When People Ask Me Why I Write These Kinds Of Stories, I Simply Say That I Was Warped As A Child. And, There Is Some Truth To That.

As A Rule, I Don't Worry About Genre. I Just Want To Tell A Good Story, With Characters That Interest Me And My Readers.

I Have An Idea Of How The Book Will Finish Up, But It Very Rarely Finishes Up The Way That I Think It's Going To.

I Didn't Want To Even Stand Next To Any High Rise Building As Long As I Lived... I Didn't Even Want To Go Over A Bridge.

Some Of This Book—perhaps Too Much—has Been About How I Learned To Do It. Much Of It Has Been About How You Can Do It Better. The Rest Of It—and Perhaps The Best Of It—is A Permission Slip: You Can, You Should, And If You're Brave Enough To Start, You Will. Writing Is Magic, As Much The Water Of Life As Any Other Creative Art. The Water Is Free. So Drink. Drink And Be Filled Up.

Dead Was The Gift That Kept On Giving. Dead, Like Diamonds, Was Forever.

Late Last Night And The Night Before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers Knocking On My Door. I Wanna Go Out, Don't Know If I Can 'cuz I'm So Afraid Of The Tommyknocker Man.

Let Me Tell You Something My Friend. Hope Is A Dangerous Thing. Hope Can Drive A Man Insane.

Stories Are Relics, Part Of An Undiscovered Pre-existing World.

You See Something, Then It Clicks With Something Else, And It Will Make A Story. But You Never Know When It's Going To Happen.

The Only Religions I Don't Like Are The Ones That Insist Their God Is Bigger Than Your God.

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

If You Think You've Gone Insane ... You're Nuts.

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.

All I Can Say Is What You Already Know: Some Days Are Treasure. Not Many, But I Think In Almost Every Life There Are A Few. That Was One Of Mine, And When I'm Blue -- When Life Comes Down On Me And Everything Looks Tawdry And Cheap, The Way Joyland Avenue Did On A Rainy Day -- I Go Back To It, If Only To Remind Myself That Life Isn't Always A Butcher's Game. Sometimes The Prizes Are Real. Sometimes They Are Precious.

People With A High Tolerance For Boredom Can Get A Lot Of Thinking Done.

People Think That I Must Be A Very Strange Person. This Is Not Correct. I Have The Heart Of A Small Boy. It Is In A Glass Jar On My Desk.

You Can Approach The Act Of Writing With Nervousness, Excitement, Hopefulness, Or Despair ... Come To It Any Way But Lightly.

I Think Part Of Being A Parent Is Trying To Kill Your Kids.

Once I Start Work On A Project, I Don’t Stop And I Don’t Slow Down Unless I Absolutely Have To. If I Don’t Write Every Day, The Characters Begin To Stale Off In My Mind – They Begin To Seem Like Characters Instead Of Real People. The Tale’s Narrative Cutting Edge Starts To Rust And I Begin To Lose My Hold On The Story’s Plot And Pace. Worst Of All, The Excitement Of Spinning Something New Begins To Fade. The Work Starts To Feel Like Work, And For Most Writers That Is The Smooch Of Death.

I've Met Talespinners Before, Jake, And They're All Cut More Or Less From The Same Cloth. They Tell Tales Because They're Afraid Of Life.

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