Quotes by Stephen King

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

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 writers trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

Sometimes you have to go on when you dont feel like it, and sometimes youre doing good work when if feels like all youre managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. Its not just a question of how-to, you see; its a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting youre not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... Its unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, Im sorry, good buddy, youve written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner?The idea has some validity, but I dont think an unbiased opinion is exactly what Im looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than This sucks. (Although most of us know that I think this has a few problems actually means This sucks, dont we?)

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.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Its about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

remember Stephen Kings First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You dont need one until youre making enough for someone to steal ... and if youre making that much, youll be able to take your pick of good agents.

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.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as Im concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Ive never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

Theres an old rule of theater that goes, If theres a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III. The reverse is also true.

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just cant describe, you might just be, I dont know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.