Quotes by Stephen King

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

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.

When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time, and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. Thats all. One stone at a time. But Ive read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. Youve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

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.

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also 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.

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, thats all.

Lets 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 isnt to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.This is how we go on.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didnt bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

If youre just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your televisions 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.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.