Stephen King Quotes - Page 4

It's 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.

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

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.

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 I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've 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.

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

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.

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?

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.

I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild - timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline - a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample - that fear may be intense.

The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself...all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough.

The world is falling down around our ears, and all these people care for is talking about fucking to women in short skirts and men with their shirts hanging open

and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.