Top 100 Quotes On Writing Stephen King
#1. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
Stephen King
#2. 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
#3. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Grammar is ... the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.
Stephen King
#8. 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
#9. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#10. Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.
Stephen King
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Writing is the act of finding out what I think.
Stephen King
#15. In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
Neil Gaiman
#16. For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
Stephen King
#17. 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
#18. Easy reading is the product of hard writing,
Stephen King
#19. 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
#21. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If you don't have time to read, then you have more time to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
#28. This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
Stephen King
#29. 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
#31. Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.
Stephen King
#32. Writing fiction ... is no job for intellectual cowards.
Stephen King
#33. 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
#34. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.
Stephen King
#35. What would writing this sort of story mean to others?
Stephen King
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off autocannibalism.
Stephen King
#40. The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
Stephen King
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.
Stephen King
#47. 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
#48. No more obsessive writing, either, accumulating notebook after notebook like little piles of rabbit turds scattered along a woodland trail.
Stephen King
#49. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room ...
Stephen King
#50. You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Stephen King
#51. 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
#52. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King
#53. Writing fiction for money is a mug's game.
Stephen King
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.
Stephen King
#58. Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable...
Stephen King
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
Stephen King
#64. ...there will always be books. ... Books are real objects. Books are friends. ... They're also ideas and emotions.
Stephen King
#65. For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching ... by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.
Stephen King
#66. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day - will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.
Stephen King
#67. Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act - as secret as dreaming - and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much.
Stephen King
#68. Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum
#69. We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.
Stephen King
#70. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
Stephen King
#71. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.
Stephen King
#72. But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.
Stephen King
#73. I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.
Stephen King
#74. 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
#75. 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
#77. Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
Stephen King
#78. He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book.
Stephen King
#79. Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.
Stephen King
#80. 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.
Stephen King
#81. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky ... more will want to do the former than the latter.
Stephen King
#82. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Stephen King
#83. The only wat to get better at writing is to write. And read.
Stephen King
#84. Readers 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 King
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
Stephen King
#88. He felt as he always did when he finished a book - queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.
Stephen King
#89. 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.
Stephen King
#90. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
#91. Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.
Stephen King
#92. The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
Stephen King
#93. Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.
Stephen King
#94. Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.
Stephen King
#95. I wasn't alone in my belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven.
Stephen King
#96. With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen
if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.
Stephen King
#97. Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories,
Stephen King
#98. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
Stephen King
#99. 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
#100. For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.
Stephen King
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