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.
Stephen KingMy father had taught me - mostly by example - that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.
Stephen KingHairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Stephen KingNo one ever really pays for betrayal in silver....The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.
Stephen KingWhy 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.
Stephen KingI got letters from people that have had peculiar psychic experiences, experiences with the dead - sometimes fairly tranquil experiences and sometimes very terrifying experiences. I do believe that a lot of them are sincere. I do believe, also, that some of them may be misguided. But, I think the majority of them have experienced something.
Stephen KingIf you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.
Stephen KingReaders have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
Stephen KingIt's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have.
Stephen KingMay be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.
Stephen KingThe first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.
Stephen KingLife was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.
Stephen KingThe 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 KingPeople want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Stephen Kingyou will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand.
Stephen KingI and everyone else in this world live in what is probably the most difficult times that have ever been. We are facing total thermonuclear destruction; and, if you can make someone believe in a ghost or a demon or a vampire in the face of that, you are doing well. From my own personal point of view, I don't think just blood and guts is enough. At least, it isn't for me. Maybe it will turn someone's stomach; but, I'm not sure that is literature or even entertainment.
Stephen KingBloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.
Stephen KingWell, I'm like a drug addict, I'm always saying I'm going to stop, and then I don't, what I've said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.
Stephen KingNinety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.
Stephen KingThere was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.
Stephen Kinga 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.
Stephen KingThey say that loving eyes can never see, but that's a fool's axiom. Sometimes, they see too much
Stephen KingYour Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other.
Stephen KingI think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.
Stephen KingBut see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
Stephen KingIn both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.
Stephen KingBut then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
Stephen KingYes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...I have written because it fulfilled me. ... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.
Stephen KingFantasy has a better chance of lasting than a lot of other things. The Hobbit and the Narnia books, they seem to get handed down father to son, mother to daughter. Because they're set in a fantasy world, they can remain relevant.
Stephen KingTrust, a sense of humor, and don't let the sun go down on an argument without trying to make it up. That's all I know about good marriage. I've been married a long time - it seems to be working.
Stephen KingThere'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.
Stephen KingI didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it.
Stephen KingI think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk.
Stephen King