Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
47 quotes
"If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered."
"Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
"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."
"For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room..."
"A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club."
"The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
"As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me."
"Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons 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 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."
"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."
"I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit."
"It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
"In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next."
"It's worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it'll probably keep working."
"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."
"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."
"The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction."
"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?"