Top 100 Quotes About Stephen King's Writing
#1. I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he ... Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.
Harold Bloom
#2. I actually love Stephen King's writing. I mean, we, actually, at Castle Rock, we've made seven movies out of Stephen King books.
Rob Reiner
#3. There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
Stephen King
#4. I attribute the black tones in my films to Stephen King, Tim Burton, Joe Hill and Richard Matheson. However, most of my writing is influenced by mental health. I'm incredibly passionate about shedding light on the stigmas associated with mental illnesses.
Anna Akana
#5. Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.
Mary Garden
#6. You need to take out the stuff that's just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!
Stephen King
#7. 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.
Stephen King
#8. 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 writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.
Stephen King
#9. Anywhere in New York, anywhere in the country, somewhere there's going to be a Coke sign. People identify with Coke. You can write a novel about New York and people from the country will read it if they feel that you've made them familiar with New York.
Stephen King
#10. There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.
Stephen King
#11. For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.
Stephen King
#12. I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Stephen King
#13. The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one's papers and identification pretty much in order.
Stephen King
#14. I don't really map anything out. I just let it happen [while writing]. But once it happens, it's always there. If it's laid, it's played. If I get to page 300 and it's not working, I junk it.
Stephen King
#15. Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.
Stephen King
#16. Let's start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King's 'On Writing' contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It's here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999.
Gary Krist
#17. 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.
Stephen King
#19. Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.
Stephen King
#20. Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable...
Stephen King
#21. Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.
Stephen King
#22. 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.
Stephen King
#23. It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.
Stephen King
#24. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.
Stephen King
#25. Writing fiction for money is a mug's game.
Stephen King
#26. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King
#27. Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.
Stephen King
#28. Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
Stephen King
#29. Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.
Peter Straub
#30. Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read.
Jason Henderson
#31. ...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...
Stephen King
#32. It's easy to become careless when making rough comparisons, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing.
Stephen King
#33. The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?
Stephen King
#34. Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
Stephen King
#35. People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time.
Stephen King
#36. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Stephen King
#37. Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.
Stephen King
#38. When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.
Stephen King
#39. If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.
Stephen King
#40. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.
Stephen King
#41. 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.
Stephen King
#42. He learned in high school that thinking too long about writing doesn't work for him. Too many other ideas get into his head and start sliding all over each other. It's better to just fire away.
Stephen King
#43. I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.
In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This ... and this ... and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.
Stephen King
#44. Good writing - good stories - are the imagination's firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.
Stephen King
#45. I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It's like lifting off in an airplane: you're on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you're up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey.
Stephen King
#46. If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's 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.
Stephen King
#47. Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.
Stephen King
#48. What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.
Stephen King
#49. There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.
Stephen King
#50. You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.
Stephen King
#51. It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut - it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
Stephen King
#52. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
#53. I'd like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing.
Stephen King
#56. The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.
Stephen King
#58. But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?
Stephen King
#59. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#60. If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.
Stephen King
#61. For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
Stephen King
#62. In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
Neil Gaiman
#63. Writing is the act of finding out what I think.
Stephen King
#64. I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea, as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought (and still think).
Stephen King
#65. I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me.
Stephen King
#66. So I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
#67. Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.
Stephen King
#68. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#69. 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.
Stephen King
#70. Grammar is ... the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.
Stephen King
#71. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
#72. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.
Stephen King
#73. I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.
Stephen King
#74. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#75. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Stephen King
#76. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
Stephen King
#78. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room ...
Stephen King
#79. No more obsessive writing, either, accumulating notebook after notebook like little piles of rabbit turds scattered along a woodland trail.
Stephen King
#80. What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
#81. If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.
Stephen King
#82. Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.
M.J. Rose
#83. Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.
Michael Koryta
#84. Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
Stephen King
#85. I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with.
Stephen King
#86. When it comes to rock music, I'm not much of a player, but I do have entry-level chops. I'm more knowledgeable as a listener, and Revival gave me a way to write about rock and roll without being preachy or boring.
Stephen King
#87. The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King
#88. Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off autocannibalism.
Stephen King
#89. You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Stephen King
#90. By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
Stephen King
#91. Constant reading will pull you into a place - a mind-set, if you like the phrase - where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.
Stephen King
#92. What would writing this sort of story mean to others?
Stephen King
#93. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.
Stephen King
#94. Writing fiction ... is no job for intellectual cowards.
Stephen King
#95. Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.
Stephen King
#97. 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.
Stephen King
#98. This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
Stephen King
#100. If you don't have time to read, then you have more time to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
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