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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.

-Stephen King

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We Like To Think

Stephen King

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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.

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...it Was More Like Bleeding Than Crying.

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In The End We Are All Caught In Devices Of Our Own Making. I Believe That. In The End We Are All Caught.

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

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You Can't Be Careful On A Skateboard.

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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.

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You Discarded Most Of The Lies Along The Way But Held On To The One That Said Life Mattered.

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Life Isn't A Support System For Art. It's The Other Way Around.

Support Systems

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Good Books Are For Consideration After, Too.

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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.

Man Has Come To Dominate The Planet Thanks To Two Essential Traits. One Is Intelligence. The Other Has Been The Absolute Willingness To Kill Anyone And Anything That Gets In His Way.

And Now, All These Years Later, It Seem To Him That The Most Horrible Fact Of Human Existence Was That Broken Hearts Mended

Of Course When You Were Running With The Bottom Dogs, What You Mostly Saw Were Paws, Claws, And Assholes.

Lover," She Whispers, And Closes Her Eyes. It Falls Upon Her. Love Is Like Dying.

He's A Very Nice Man And All That, Easy To Get Along With, Fun, He Never Makes Me Cry. But Is That Love? I Mean, Is That All There Is To It? Even When You Learned To Ride Your Two-wheeler, You Had To Fall Off A Few Times And Scrape Both Knees. Call It A Rite Of Passage. And That Was Just A Little Thing.

Everything's A Lot Tougher When It's For Real. That's When You Choke. When It's For Real.

Politics Always Change. Stories Never Do.

I'm Not The First Person To Have Said This - No Writer Ever Feels That The Execution Of A Book Lives Up To The Idea For That Book. The Execution Always Falls Short.

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

The Scholar's Greatest Weakness: Calling Procrastination Research.

Procrastination

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

It Was Like Drowning, Only From The Inside Out.

A Dimwit Thinks Nothing Is Funny Unless It's Mean.

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

I Am, When You Stop To Think Of It, A Member Of A Fairly Select Group: The Final Handful Of American Novelists Who Learned To Read And Write Before They Learned To Eat A Daily Helping Of Video Bullshit.

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 Go Where The Story Leads. And, Sometimes, It Is A Little Bit Outrageous. And I Relish That. I Sort Of Want To Be As Much On The Edge As I Can.

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People Think First Love Is Sweet, And Never Sweeter Than When That First Bond Snaps. You've Heard A Thousand Pop And Country Songs That Prove The Point; Some Fool Got His Heart Broke. Yet That First Broken Heart Is Always The Most Painful, The Slowest To Mend, And Leaves The Most Visible Scar. What's So Sweet About That?

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This Inhuman Place Makes Human Monsters.

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

When We Blew The First Atomic Bomb At White Sands Near The End Of The War, Nobody Knew What Was Going To Happen. There Was A Theory That The Chain Reaction Would Continue Forever. And We Would Have Created A Little Tiny Sun Out There In The Desert That Would Burn Until The End Of The Universe. It Wasn't A Widely Held Theory But It Was A Theory That Nobody Had A Way Of Disproving. There Were People Who Thought It Wouldn't Go Off At All, That It Would Simply Sit Out There And Melt And Produce A Great Big Dirty Cloud Of Radioactivity. Nobody Knew.

The Redness Was Going Out Of The Light Now, The Remains Of The Day Were A Fading Pink, The Color Of Wild Roses.

Making People Believe The Unbelievable Is No Trick; It's Work... Belief And Reader Absorption Come In The Details: An Overturned Tricycle In The Gutter Of An Abandoned Neighborhood Can Stand For Everything.

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When Creative People Do Their Best Work, They're Hardly Ever In Charge, They're Just Sort Of Rolling Along With Their Eyes Shut Yelling Wheee.

If You Intend To Write As Truthfully As You Can, Your Days As A Member Of Polite Society Are Numbered, Anyway... You Must Be Prepared To Do Some Serious Turning Inward Toward The Life Of The Imagination, And That Means, I'm Afraid, That Geraldo, Keith Obermann, And Jay Leno Must Go. Reading Takes Time, And The Glass Teat Takes Too Much Of It.

The Mind Can Calculate, But The Spirit Yearns, And The Heart Knows What The Heart Knows

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

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.

It Was How Wars Really Ended, Dieffenbaker Supposed -- Not At Truce Tables But In Cancer Wards And Office Cafeterias And Traffic Jams. Wars Died One Tiny Piece At A Time, Each Piece Something That Fell Like A Memory, Each Lost Like An Echo That Fades In Winding Hills. In The End Even War Ran Up The White Flag. Or So He Hoped. He Hoped That In The End Even War Surrendered.

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.

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

Any Game Looks Straight If Everyone Is Being Cheated At Once.

And This Wasn’t Lying, Not Really. It Was Leaving Out.

There’s Always A Choice. That’s God’s Way, Always Will Be. Your Will Is Still Free. Do As You Will. There’s No Set Of Leg-irons On You. But... This Is What God Wants Of You.

I'm Not A Big Fan Of Psychoanalysis: I Think If You Have Mental Problems What You Need Are Good Pills. But I Do Think That If You Have Thinks That Bother You, Things That Are Unresolved, The More That You Talk About Them, Write About Them, The Less Serious They Become.

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

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.

Black As Night And As Beautiful As Forever.

Talent Is Never Static. It's Always Growing Or Dying.

Understand Death? Sure. That Was When The Monsters Got You.

There's Nothing Like Stories On A Windy Night When Folks Have Found A Warm Place In A Cold World.

A Secret Needs Two Faces To Bounce Between; A Secret Needs To See Itself In Another Pair Of Eyes.

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

... Suicide Gets In The Air Sometimes. Like A Cold Germ.

I Never Had Any Friends Later On Like The Ones I Had When I Was 12 - Jesus, Did You?

Las Personas Con Un Alto Nivel De Tolerancia Al Aburrimiento Tienen Tiempo De Sobra Para Pensar.

Dolls With No Little Girls Around To Mind Them Were Sort Of Creepy Under Any Conditions.

Friends. They Aren’t Any Such Thing As Good Friend Or Bad Friend. Maybe There Are Just Friend. People Who Stand By You When You're Hurt And Who Helped You Feel Not So Lonely. Maybe There Are Worth Being Scared For And Hoping For And Living For. Maybe Worth Dying For Too. If That What Has To Be. No Bad Friends. Only People You Want. Need To Be With. People Who Build Their Houses In Your Heart.

Lying In The Bed That Had Once Held Two, Lisey Thought Alone Never Felt More Lonely Than When You Woke Up And Discovered You Still Had The House To Yourself. That You And The Mice In The Walls Were The Only Ones Still Breathing.

Women's Lib, Frannie Had Decided, Was Nothing More Nor Less Than An Outgrowth Of The Technological Society. Women Were At The Mercy Of Their Bodies. They Were Smaller. They Tended To Be Weaker. A Man Couldn't Get With Child, But A Woman Could---every Four-year-old Knows It. And A Pregnant Woman Is A Vulnerable Human Being. Civilization Had Provided An Umbrella Of Sanity That Both Sexes Could Stand Beneath.

No, It's Not A Very Good Story - Its Author Was Too Busy Listening To Other Voices To Listen As Closely As He Should Have To The One Coming From Inside.

Listening To Others

Good Luck Is Just Bad Luck With Its Hair Combed.

The Great Thing About Writing Is That...you Can Do All These Antisocial Things And You Get Paid For Them And Nobody Ever Arrests You Because They're All Make-believe. Then That Way If You Were Actually Ever Driven To Do Any Of Those Things, The Pressure's Off Because You'd Have Already Written Them Down. It's Therapy.

He Could Feel The Pores Of His Body Open Like A Million Mouths And Slurp The Water In Like A Sponge.

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

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

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.

Writers Remember Everything...especially The Hurts. Strip A Writer To The Buff, Point To The Scars, And He'll Tell You The Story Of Each Small One. From The Big Ones You Get Novels. A Little Talent Is A Nice Thing To Have If You Want To Be A Writer, But The Only Real Requirement Is The Ability To Remember The Story Of Every Scar. Art Consists Of The Persistence Of Memory.

I Love My Sons And I Love That They Are Writers - I Also Love My Daughter, Who's A Minister And An Orchard Keeper! - But I Wouldn't Wish The Burden Of Mid-world And The Dark Tower On Them. I Enjoy Working With Them, Though, Because We Fit Together.

We All Float Down Here!

The Advantage Of Horror Books Is To Take The Reader And Cut Him Out Of The Pack And Work On Him One On One. It Has Its Advantages Because The People That Are There In The Movie Theater Really Are A Mob. If You Get One Guy Alone You Can Do A More Efficient Job Of Scaring Him.

A Lot Of Us Grow Up And We Grow Out Of The Literal Interpretation That We Get When We're Children, But We Bear The Scars All Our Life. Whether They're Scars Of Beauty Or Scars Of Ugliness, It's Pretty Much In The Eye Of The Beholder.

I Wasn't A Social Drinker. I Used To Say That I Didn't Want To Go To Bars Because They Were Full Of Assholes Like Me.

Home Is Watching The Moon Rise Over The Open, Sleeping Land And Having Someone You Can Call To The Window, So You Can Look Together. Home Is Where You Dance With Others, And Dancing Is Life.

She Had Never Dreamed There Could Be So Much Pain In A Life When There Was Nothing Physically Wrong. She Hurt All The Time.

If You Write (or Paint Or Dance Or Sculpt Or Sing, I Suppose), Someone Will Try To Make You Feel Lousy About It, That's All.

Later, Going Home, I Realized They Didn't Look Alike At All; What Made Them Seem To Was The Aftermath Of Stress And The Lingering Of Sorrow. It's Strange How Pain Marks Our Faces, And Makes Us Look Like Family.

The Most Important Things Are The Hardest To Say

Don’t Go Beyond, No Matter How Much You Feel You Need To, Doctor. The Barrier Was Not Made To Be Broken. Remember This: There Is More Power Here Than You Know. It Is Old And Always Restless. Remember.

All Thing Serve The Beam

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.

C-c-can You Get Bones In Your Buh-buh-brain?' Bill Asked. This Was Turning Into The Most Interesting Conversation He'd Had In Weeks.

Interesting Conversation

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.

I Had A Period Where I Thought I Might Not Be Good Enough To Publish.

So Do We Pass The Ghosts That Haunt Us Later In Our Lives; They Sit Undramatically By The Roadside Like Poor Beggars, And We See Them Only From The Corners Of Our Eyes, If We See Them At All. The Idea That They Have Been Waiting There For Us Rarely Crosses Our Minds. Yet They Do Wait, And When We Have Passed, They Gather Up Their Bundles Of Memory And Fall In Behind, Treading In Our Footsteps And Catching Up, Little By Little.

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

I Recognize Terror As The Finest Emotion And So I Will Try To Terrorize The Reader. But If I Find That I Cannot Terrify, I Will Try To Horrify, And If I Find That I Cannot Horrify, I'll Go For The Gross-out. I'm Not Proud.

We've Switched From A Culture That Was Interested In Manufacturing, Economics, Politics - Trying To Play A Serious Part In The World - To A Culture That's Really Entertainment-based.

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

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Yves Saint Laurent

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