Background Image

...

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

-Stephen King

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The First Is That

Stephen King

...

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

Views: 47348

Topic

More From Stephen King

I Can't See The Future, But It's Grim. The Depletion Of Resources - We're Living In This Dine-and-dash Economy.

Sometimes Life Coughs Up Coincidences No Writer Of Fiction Would Dare Copy.

Zombies Are The New Vampire.

We'll Just Have To Get Along. That's What People Do, You Know? They Just Get Along. And Try To Help Each Other.

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

Hearts Can Break. Yes, Hearts Can Break. Sometimes I Think It Would Be Better If We Died When They Did, But We Don't.

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

I Get Inspiration, A Lot Of Times, From Very Commonplace Things That Just Strike A Chord And Develop Themselves In The Subconscious.

Words Create Sentences; Sentences Create Paragraphs; Sometimes Paragraphs Quicken And Begin To Breathe.

They Were Nice Enough People And All, But There Wasn't Much Love In Them. Because They Were Too Busy Being Afraid. Love Didn't Grow Very Well In A Place Where There Was Only Fear, Just As Plants Didn't Grow Very Well In A Place Where It Was Always Dark.

Kill Your Darlings, Kill Your Darlings, Even When It Breaks Your Egocentric Little Scribbler’s Heart, Kill Your Darlings.

I Think Reality Is Thin, You Know, Thin As Lake Ice After A Thaw, And We Fill Our Lives With Noise And Light And Motion To Hide That Thinness From Ourselves.

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

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.

Her Body Was Wrapped In Shadows Like Moth Wings, Like Rose-petals.

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

I Am The Literary Equivalent Of A Big Mac And Fries.

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.

I Don't Really Get Philosophical, But I Believe That Nice People Are Strong And Usually In My Horror Stories, I Don't Like To Write About The Old Standard Where Some Rotten Guy Gets Chased By A Mean Spirit That Gets Him In The End.i'd Rather Write About Nice People That Are Menaced From Outside By Some Sort Of Evil Power And Who Sort Of Slug It Out.

There Are All Sorts Of Theories And Ideas About What Constitutes A Good Opening Line. It's Tricky Thing, And Tough To Talk About Because I Don't Think Conceptually While I Work On A First Draft -- I Just Write. To Get Scientific About It Is A Little Like Trying To Catch Moonbeams In A Jar. But There's One Thing I'm Sure About. An Opening Line Should Invite The Reader To Begin The Story. It Should Say: Listen. Come In Here. You Want To Know About This.

Some Guys-a Lot Of Guys-don't Believe What They Are Seeing, Especially If It Gets In The Way Of What They Want To Eat Or Drink Or Believe. Me, I Don't Believe In God. But If I Saw Him, I Would. I Wouldn't Just Go Around Saying, "jesus, That Was A Great Special Effect." The Definition Of An Asshole Is A Guy Who Doesn't Believe What He's Seeing.

One Of Life's Great Truths Is This: When One Is About To Be Struck By A Speeding Six-hundred Pound Coke Machine, One Need Worry About Little Else.

The Best Show On Television Is Red Sox Baseball. Everything Else Sucks.

I Think Most Of Us Are Fascinated By The Macabre And By The Weird And Even The Nastiness That Comes Along.

And The Most Terrifying Question Of All May Be Just How Much Horror The Human Mind Can Stand And Still Maintain A Wakeful, Staring, Unrelenting Sanity.

All You Need To Do Is Hold On Tight...and Believe.

The Universe (he Said) Offers A Paradox Too Great For The Finite Mind To Grasp. As The Living Brain Cannot Conceive Of A Nonliving Brain — Although It May Think It Can — The Finite Mind Cannot Grasp The Infinite.

I Would Say Plotting Is The Most Difficult Thing For Me. Characterization Is Only Hard Because Sometimes I Feel I Get So Interested In It That I Want To Talk Too Much About The Characters And That Slows The Story Down. So I Say, "hey, People Want To Find Out What's Going To Happen Next, They Don't Want To Listen To You Spout Off About This Or That Person." But I Think Even The Bad Guy Deserves To Tell His Side Of The Story.

He Would Write It For The Reason He Felt That All Great Literature, Fiction And Nonfiction, Was Written: Truth Comes Out, In The End It Always Comes Out. He Would Write It Because He Felt He Had To.

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

Every Marriage Has Two Hearts, One Light And One Dark

Whenever I Publish A Book, I Feel Like A Trapper Caught By The Iroquois. They're All Lined Up With Tomahawks, And The Idea Is To Run Through With Your Head Down, And Everybody Gets To Take A Swing. They Hit You In The Head, The Back, The Ass, And The Balls.

I Believe There Is An Unseen World All Around Us.

Only Enemies Speak The Truth; Friends And Lovers Lie Endlessly, Caught In The Web Of Duty.

I'm Going To Be Dead For A Long Time, So I Have A Lot To Do Now.

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.

When I Was A Kid I Believed Everything I Was Told, Everything I Read, And Every Dispatch Sent Out By My Own Overheated Imagination. This Made For More Than A Few Sleepless Nights, But It Also Filled The World I Lived In With Colors And Textures I Would Not Have Traded For A Lifetime Of Restful Nights.

In The End, The Wind Takes Everything, Doesn't It? And Why Not? Why Other? If The Sweetness Of Our Lives Did Not Depart, There Would Be No Sweetness At All.

Hemingway Sucks. If I Set Out To Write That Way, It Would Have Been Been Hollow And Lifeless Because It Wasn't Me.

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.

When You Put On A Clown Suit And A Rubber Nose, Nobody Has Any Idea What You Look Like Inside.

The Monster Nevers Dies.

All Right I Think We've Been Down Here In The Dark Long Enough. There's A Whole Other World Upstairs. Take My Hand Constant Reader And I'll Be Happy To Lead You Back Into The Sunshine. I'm Happy To Go There Because I Believe Most People Are Essentially Good. I Know That I Am. It's You I'm Not Entirely Sure Of.

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

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

And As A Writer, One Of The Things That I've Always Been Interested In Doing Is Actually Invading Your Comfort Space. Because That's What We're Supposed To Do. Get Under Your Skin, And Make You React.

He Was A Romantic In His Own Harsh Way…yet He Was Also Realist Enough To Know That Some Times Love Actually Did Conquer All.

Grammar Is...the Pole You Grab To Get Your Thoughts Up On Their Feet And Walking.

Feet And Walking

There Should Be No Telephone In Your Writing Room, Certainly No Tv Or Videogames For You To Fool Around With. If There’s A Window, Draw The Curtains Or Pull Down The Shades Unless It Looks Out At A Blank Wall.

Want To Know The Best Thing About Teaching? Seeing That Moment When A Kid Discovers His Or Her Gift. There's No Feeling On Earth Like It.

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.

Now I Think All Of Us Were Born With A Hole In Our Hearts, And We Go Around Looking For The Person Who Can Fill It. You... You Fill Me Up.

Fantasy Fiction Is Essentially About The Concept Of Power; Great Fantasy Fiction Is About People Who Find It At Great Cost Or Lose It Tragically; Mediocre Fantasy Fiction Is About People Who Have It And Never Lose It But Simply Wield It.

The Terror, Which Would Not End For Another 28 Years-if It Ever Did End-began, So Far As I Know Or Can Tell, With A Boat Made From A Sheet Of Newspaper Floating Down A Gutter Swollen With Rain.

Whenever Anything Important Happens In America, They Have To Gold-plate It, Like Baby Shoes. That Way You Can Forget It.

The More Fiction You Read And Write, The More You'll Find Your Paragraphs Forming On Their Own.

Pain Is The Biggest Power Of Love.

Because Things Like This You Can Only Ssay Once. And You Either Get It Wrong Or Right, It's The End Either Way, Because It's Too Hard To Ever Try To Say Again.

I Do Not Kill With My Gun; He Who Kills With His Gun Has Forgotten The Face Of His Father. I Kill With My Heart.

I Choose To Believe In God, But I Have Serious Doubts.

I Like To Write Short Stories More Because I Never Met A Writer Who Wasn't Lazy. And A Short Story Is, By Its Very Definition, Short. It Is Something That Generally You Can Turn Out In A Week To Two Weeks Depending On How Well It Goes For You. But, At The Same Time, It Gives The Same Satisfaction Of Creating A Complete World.

I Never Have A Thematic Intention At The Outset.

A Lot Of Fairy Tales Are Thinly Disguised Hostility Raps Against Parents. Kids Know That They Can't Make It On Their Own, That If They Were Left Alone, They Would Die.

No Writer, Painter, Or Actor - No Artist - Is Ever Handed A Sharp Knife (although A Few People Are Handed Almighty Big Ones; The Name We Give To The Artist With The Big Knife Is 'genius'), And We Hone With Varying Degrees Of Zeal And Aptitude.

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.

Some Things Were Better Lost Than Found.

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!

Anyway, As The Old Barrelhouse Song Says, My God, How The Money Rolled In. Norton Must Have Subscribed To The Old Puritan Notion That The Best Way To Figure Out Which Folks God Favours Is By Checking Their Bank Acounts.

Home Is Where You Dance With Others, And Dancing Is Life.

If I Cannot Horrify, I'll Go For The Gross Out. I'm Not Proud.

Did You Know That Dairy Queen Ice Cream Is Mostly Bubbles?

It Always Comes Down To Just Two Choices. Get Busy Living, Or Get Busy Dying.

It Was Really Amazing The Number Of Hard Hits From Which A Mind Could Recover.

My Wife Says, And I Agree With Her, That What Would Be Really Great For Maine Would Be To Legalize Dope Completely And Set Up Dope Stores The Way That There Are State-run Liquor Stores. You Could Get Your Acapulco Gold Or Your Whatever It Happened To Be - Your Augusta Gold Or Your Bangor Gold. And People Would Come From All The Other States To Buy It, And There Could Be A State Tax On It. Then Everybody In Maine Could Have A Cadillac.

God Turned Out To Be A Bunch Of Bad Little Kids Playing Interstellar Xbox. Isn't That Funny?

It's Hard For Me To Believe That People Who Read Very Little (or Not At All In Some Cases) Should Presume To Write And Expect People To Like What They Have Written.

But Who Can Foresee Such Things? None Of Us Can Predict The Final Outcomes Of Our Actions, And Few Of Us Even Try; Most Of Us Just Do What We Do To Prolong A Moment's Pleasure Or To Stop The Pain. And Even When We Act For The Noblest Reasons, The Last Link Of The Chain All Too Often Drips With Someone's Blood.

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

I Was Being Paid To Do What I Loved, And There's No Gig On Earth Better Than That; It's Like A License To Steal.

Shall There Be Truth Between Us, As Two Men? Not As Friends, But As Enemies And Equals?

The One Thing About Kids Is That You Never Really Know Exactly What They're Thinking Or How They're Seeing. After Writing About Kids, Which Is A Little Bit Like Putting The Experience Under A Magnifying Glass, You Realize You Have No Idea How You Thought As A Kid. I've Come To The Conclusion That Most Of The Things That We Remember About Our Childhood Are Lies. We All Have Memories That Stand Out From When We Were Kids, But They're Really Just Snapshots. You Can't Remember How You Reacted Because Your Whole Head Is Different When You Stand Aside.

Sometimes An Accident Can Be An Unhappy Womans Best Friend

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.

If The Stuff You're Writing Is Not For Yourself, It Won't Work.

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.

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

Be True, Be Brave, Stand All The Rest Is Darkness.

Overhead Was A Sky Blacker Than Jewlers' Velvet, And A Billion Stars Screamed Down.

We Each Owe A Death, There Are No Exceptions, I Know That, But Sometimes, Oh God, The Green Mile Is So Long.

He Had Never Been A Social Man. He Had Shunned Causes With Contempt And Disgust. They Were For Pig-simple Suckers And People With Too Much Time And Money On Their Hands.

Time's The Thief Of Memory

I Still Believe In The Resilience Of The Human Heart And The Essential Validity Of Love;i Still Believe That Connections Between People Can Be Made And That The Spirits Which Inhabit Us Sometimes Touch. I Still Believe That The Cost Of These Connections Is Horribly, Outrageously High... And I Still Believe That The Value Received Far Outweighs The Price Which Must Be Paid. (from Introductory Notes.)

The Unconscious Mind Writes Poetry If It's Left Alone.

What Happens To The Wide-eyed Observer When The Window Between Reality And Unreality Breaks And The Glass Begins To Fly?

See The Bear Of Fearsome Size! All The World's Within His Eyes. Time Grows Thin, The Past Is A Riddle; The Tower Awaits You In The Middle.

You Cannot Friend A Hawk, They Said, Unless You Are A Hawk Yourself, Alone And Only A Sojourner In The Land, Without Friends Or The Need Of Them.

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

We All Do What We Can, And It Has To Be Good Enough, And If It Isn't Good Enough, It Has To Do.

Write With The Door Closed, Rewrite With The Door Open. Your Stuff Starts Out Being Just For You, In Other Words, But Then It Goes Out. Once You Know What The Story Is And Get It Right — As Right As You Can, Anyway — It Belongs To Anyone Who Wants To Read It. Or Criticize It.

The Trick Is To Teach Yourself To Read In Small Sips As Well As Long Swallows.

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.

Pride Was The Belt You Used To Hold Your Pants Up When You Had No Pants.

How Life Did Imitate Art Sometimes. And The Cruder The Art, The Closer The Imitation.

He Didn’t Know If That Was Really True Or Not, But He Discovered Something Which Was Tremendously Liberating: He Didn’t Care. He Was Very Tired Of Thinking And Thinking And Still Not Knowing. He Was Also Tired Of Being Frightened, Like A Man Who Has Entered A Cave On A Lark And Now Begins To Suspect He Is Lost. Stop Thinking About It, Then. That’s The Solution.

The Situation Comes First...the Characters...come Next...[then] Begin To Narrate.

In A Brilliant Fusion Of Fact And Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips Has Written The Novel Of The Year. It's The Story Of A Serial Killer's Crimes And Capture, Yes, But It's Also A Compulsively Readable Story Of How One Brave Woman Faces Up To Acts Of Terrible Violence In Order To Create Something Good And Strong In The Aftermath. Quiet Dell Will Be Compared To In Cold Blood, But Phillips Offers Something Capote Could Not: A Heroine Who Lights Up The Dark Places And Gives Us Hope In Our Humanity.

As A Species We're Fundamentally Insane.

Seven, Richie Thought. That's The Magic Number. There Has To Be Seven Of Us. That's The Way It's Supposed To Be.

The Boat Dipped And Swayed And Sometimes Took On Water, But It Did Not Sink; The Two Brothers Had Waterproofed It Well. I Do Not Know Where It Finally Fetched Up, If It Ever Did; Perhaps It Reached The Sea And Sails There Forever, Like A Magic Boat In A Fairytale. All I Know Is That It Was Still Afloat And Still Running On The Breast Of The Flood When It Passed The Incorporated Town Limits Of Derry, Maine, And There It Passes Out Of This Tale Forever.

So Where Do The Ideas-the Salable Ideas-come From? They Come From My Nightmares. Not The Night-time Variety, As A Rule, But The Ones That Hide Just Beyond The Doorway That Separates The Conscious From The Unconscious.

When All Else Fails, Give Up And Go To The Library.

I'd Like To Take A Motorcycle Trip Across Europe, Maybe Even Across China. Of Course I'd Also Like To Broker A Peace Agreement Between The Israelis And The Palestinians, But It's Important To Put Ceilings On One's Ambitions.

When Facts Speak, The Wise Man Listens.

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

There Were No Horror Movies Or Horror Books To Speak Of In The '40s. I Picked The '50s Because That Pretty Well Spans My Life As An Appreciator - As Somebody Who's Been Involved With This Mass Cult Of Horror, From Radio And Movies And Saturday Matinees And Books. In The '40s There Really Wasn't That Much. People Don't Want To Read About Horrible Things In Horrible Times. So, In The '40s, There Was Val Lutin With The Cat People And The Curse Of The Cat People And There Wasn't Much Else.

I Don't Want To Just Mess With Your Head. I Want To Mess With Your Life.... I Want You To Miss Appointments, Burn Dinner, Skip Your Homework. I Want You To Tell Your Wife To Take That Moonlight Stroll On The Beach At Waikiki With The Resort Tennis Pro While You Read A Few More Chapters.

Not Every Book Has To Be Loaded With Symbolism, Irony, Or Musical Language, But It Seems To Me That Every Book-at Least Every One Worth Reading-is About Something.

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

Eddie Discovered One Of His Childhood's Great Truths. Grownups Are The Real Monsters, He Thought.

Wendy? Darling? Light, Of My Life. I'm Not Gonna Hurt Ya. I'm Just Going To Bash Your Brains In.

When I Was Younger, I Used To Vacillate Between Thinking Love Was This Great And Glorious Mystery And Thinking It Was Just Something A Bunch Of Hollywood Move Producers Made Up To Sell More Tickets In The Depression, When Dish Night Kind Of Played Out." Eddie Laughed. Now I Think That All Of Us Are Born With A Hole In Our Hearts, And We Go Around Looking For The Person Who Can Fill It. You...eddie, You Fill Me Up.

There Are A Great Many Ways To Commit Suicide You Know.

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.

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

Until We See Each Other Again, Keep Your Head Together, Read Some Good Books, Be Useful, Be Happy.

It Is Fairly Clear That Many Of The Arguments Against Proposition Testing Are Really Arguments Against Propositions Themselves.

The Brain Is A Muscle That Can Move The World.

A Person Can Go Along Quite Awhile If They Get A Good Day Every Once And Again.

Life Was A Wheel, Its Only Job Was To Turn, And It Always Came Back To Where It Started.

Never Give A Good Politician Time To Pray.

...writing Fiction...is No Job For Intellectual Cowards.

A Little Arrogance (or Even A Lot) Isn't Such A Bad Thing, Although Your Mother Undoubtedly Told You Different. Mine Did. "pride Goeth Before A Fall, Stephen", She Said... And Then I Found Out - Right Around The Age That Is 19 X 2 - That Eventually You Fall Down, Anyway.

Read A Lot, Write A Lot Is The Great Commandment.

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

Terrible Thing To Live In Fear. Brooks Hatlen Knew It. Knew It All Too Well. All I Want Is To Be Back Where Things Make Sense. Where I Won't Have To Be Afraid All The Time.

It's Not The Pain I'm Afraid Of; I Know About The Pain. What I'm Afraid Of Is The End Of This Small, Sweet Dream.

What If I Fall?', Tim Cried. Maerlyn Laughed. 'sooner Or Later, We All Do.

Sometimes Human Places, Create Inhuman Monsters.

If A Writer Knows What He Or She Is Doing, I'll Go Along For The Ride. If He Or She Doesn't... Well, I'm In My Fifties Now, And There Are A Lot Of Books Out There. I Don't Have Time To Waste With The Poorly Written Ones.

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

The Good Thing About Being Old, Is You Don’t Have To Worry About Dying Young.

The Color White Is The Absence Of Memory.

For A Moment Everything Was Clear, And When That Happens You See That The World Is Barely There At All. Don't We All Secretly Know This? It's A Perfectly Balanced Mechanism Of Shouts And Echoes Pretending To Be Wheels And Cogs, A Dreamclock Chiming Beneath A Mystery-glass We Call Life. Behind It? Below It And Around It? Chaos, Storms. Men With Hammers, Men With Knives, Men With Guns. Women Who Twist What They Cannot Dominate And Belittle What They Cannot Understand. A Universe Of Horror And Loss Surrounding A Single Lighted Stage Where Mortals Dance In Defiance Of The Dark.

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.

I Like To Always Stop With A Couple Of Pages That I Haven't - That Are Just Raw Copy, Where I Haven't Touched It, I Haven't Tried To Revise It, I Haven't Tried To Polish It. It's Like Having A Little Bit Of A Runway. The Next Day When You Sit Down, You Have The Comfort Of Saying, Well, I Have Got A Little Bit Here, Used To Be In The Typewriter. Now It's In The Magic Box, The Computer.

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

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.

It's Best To Be Ruthless With The Past.

When Asked, 'how Do You Write?' I Invariably Answer, 'one Word At A Time.'

If You Can't Laugh When Things Go Bad--laugh And Put On A Little Carnival--then You're Either Dead Or Wishing You Were.

If You Can Read In The 21st Century You Own The World.

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

Only Two Things Happen To Writers When They Die: Either Their Work Survives, Or It Becomes Forgotten.

Fear Is The Emotion That Makes Us Blind.

Few If Any Seemed To Have Grasped The Principle Of Reality; New Knowledge Leads Always To Yet More Awesome Mysteries. Greater Physiological Knowledge Of The Brain Makes The Existence Of The Soul Less Possible Yet More Probable By The Nature Of The Search.

I Like To Hang Out Clothes On Windy Days. Sometimes That's All I Feel Like. A Sheet On A Line.

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.

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.

When A Good Writer Is Having Fun, The Audience Is Almost Always Having Fun Too.

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.

The Beauty Of Religious Mania Is That It Has The Power To Explain Everything. Once God (or Satan) Is Accepted As The First Cause Of Everything Which Happens In The Mortal World, Nothing Is Left To Chance ... Or Change. Once Such Incantatory Phrases As "we See Now Through A Glass Darkly" And "mysterious Are The Ways". He Chooses His Wonders To Perform" Are Mastered, Logic Can Be Happily Tossed Out The Window". Religious Mania Is One Of The Few Infallible Ways Of Responding To The World's Vagaries, Because It Totally Eliminates Pure Accident. To The True Religious Maniac, It's All On Purpose.

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 Beauty Of Religious Mania Is That It Has The Power To Explain Everything. Once God (or Satan) Is Accepted As The First Cause Of Everything Which Happens In The Mortal World, Nothing Is Left To Chance...logic Can Be Happily Tossed Out The Window.

If You Wrote Something For Which Someone Sent You A Check, If You Cashed The Check And It Didn't Bounce, And If You Then Paid The Light Bill With The Money, I Consider You Talented.

The Scariest Moment Is Always Just Before You Start.

Rewrite Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

There Were People Who Lied For Gain, People Who Lied From Pain, People Who Lied Simply Because The Concept Of Telling The Truth Was Utterly Alien To Them . . . And Then There Were People Who Lied Because They Were Waiting For It To Be Time To Tell The Truth.

It Was Always A Pleasure To Write. I Can Never Think Of A Time When I Just Hacked Something Out To Fulfil A Contract Or Meet A Deadline. I Might Have Hacked Things Out, But It Was Always Stuff I Loved.

If Anyone Ever Asks You What Panic Is, Now You Can Tell Them: An Emotional Blank Spot That Leaves You Feeling As If You've Been Sucking On A Mouthful Of Pennies.

The Last Good Time Always Comes, And When You See The Darkness Creeping Toward You, You Hold On To What Was Bright And Good. You Hold On For Dear Life.

Successful Rebellions Always Begin In Secret.

Nobody Likes To See A Stupid Guy Wise Up.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft Minus 10%.

And I Wonder If There Is Really Any Point To What I'm Doing, Or What I'm Supposed To Make Of A World Where A Man Can Get Rich Playing "let's Pretend

But It's Hard For A Man To Give Up All His Pleasures, Even When They Don't Pleasure Him No More.

Why Don't We All Just Go Crazy When We Know Were Going To Croak? Because The Mind's A Monkey. You Put Things In Departments And You Go Ahead. You Go On And Plan For The Future And Assume That The Future's Going To Work Out Okay. Yet We Know That Sooner Or Later We're All Going To Be Eating Worms, Whether It's Fifty Years Or Sixty. It Might Be Tomorrow. It Might Happen Today.

My Mother Was A Reader, And She Read To Us. She Read Us Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde When I Was Six And My Brother Was Eight; I Never Forgot It.

As A Kid, Death Seemed Boring To Me. As An Adult, I Think That It Seems More Like A Waste Of Everything. Somebody Once Said Every Time A Professor Dies, A Library Burns.

I Think There Ought To Be Some Serious Discussion By Smart People, Really Smart People, About Whether Or Not Proliferation Of Things Like The Smoking Gun And Tmz And Youtube And The Whole Celebrity Culture Is Healthy.

We Have Once Again Succeeded In Destroying What We Could Not Create.

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.

Jk Rowling Created Seven Horcruxes. She Put A Part Of Her Soul In Every Book And Now Her Books Will Live Forever

Anything With The Power To Make You Laugh Over Thirty Years Later Isn’t A Waste Of Time. I Think Something Like That Is Very Close To Immortality.

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.

I'm Rightly Tired Of The Pain I Hear And Feel, Boss. I'm Tired Of Bein On The Road, Lonely As A Robin In The Rain. Not Never Havin No Buddy To Go On With Or Tell Me Where We's Comin From Or Goin To Or Why. I'm Tired Of People Bein Ugly To Each Other. It Feels Like Pieces Of Glass In My Head. I'm Tired Of All The Times I've Wanted To Help And Couldn't. I'm Tired Of Bein In The Dark. Mostly It's The Pain. There's Too Much. If I Could End It, I Would. But I Can't.

The Shining. It Was A Good Name, A Comforting Name, Because She Had Always Thought Of It As A Dark Thing.

It's Actually Against My Religion To Laugh At Men Who Are Toting Guns.

And I Guess You Judge How Well You're Doing By How Well You Sleep At Night... And What Your Dreams Are Like.

Superstition, Like True Love, Needs Time To Grow And Reflect Upon Itself.

How Do We Remember To Remember? That's A Question I've Asked Myself Often Since My Time On Duma Key, Often In The Small Hours Of The Morning, Looking Up Into The Absence Of Light, Remembering Absent Friends. Sometimes In Those Little Hours I Think About The Horizon. You Have To Establish The Horizon. You Have To Mark The White. A Simple Enough Act, You Might Say, But Any Act That Re-makes The World Is Heroic. Or So I've Come To Believe.

In Many Cases When A Reader Puts A Story Aside Because It 'got Boring,' The Boredom Arose Because The Writer Grew Enchanted With His Powers Of Description And Lost Sight Of His Priority, Which Is To Keep The Ball Rolling.

He Had A Massive Stroke. He Died With His Tie On. Do You Think That Could Be Our Generation's Equivalent Of That Old Saying About Dying With Your Boots On?

Time Is A Keyhole.... We Sometimes Bend And Peer Through It. And The Wind We Feel On Our Cheeks When We Do--the Wind That Blows Through The Keyhole--is The Breath Of All The Living Universe.

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 Overlook Was Still Not Done With Him. Written On The Mirror, Not In Lipstick But In Blood, Was A Single Word: Redrum

As A Species We're Fundamentally Insane. Put More Than Two Of Us In A Room, We Pick Sides And Start Dreaming Up Reasons To Kill One Another. Why Do You Think We Invented Politics And Religion?

Oh Christ, He Groaned To Himself, If This Is The Stuff Adults Have To Think About I Never Want To Grow Up

What I'd Show You Is Much More Bizarre Than Anything We Have Looked At So Far, And I Warn You In Advance That The First Impulse Will Be To Laugh. That's All Right. Laugh If You Must. Just Don't Take Your Eye Off What You See, For Even In Your Imagination, Here Is A Creature Who Can Do You Damage.

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

And Then Woe Is You, Pauly. Woe To The Max.

Trending Author

Rod Blagojevich

Johann Georg Hamann

Melissa Etheridge

Category