
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

Without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void. —
Stephen King

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. —
Stephen King

Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written. —
Stephen King

What is writing? Writing is telepathy. —
Stephen King

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day. —
Neil Gaiman

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. —
Stephen King

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around. —
Stephen King

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

We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons. —
Stephen King

Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. —
Stephen King

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth. —
Stephen King

Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema. —
Mary Garden

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own. —
Stephen King

Writing is refined thinking. —
Stephen King

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while. —
Stephen King

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

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven. —
Stephen King

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up. —
Stephen King

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered. —
Stephen King

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams. —
Stephen King

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

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings. —
Stephen King

I think we tend to write out our phobias. —
Stephen King

Writing is magic. —
Stephen King

Writing fiction for money is a mug's game. —
Stephen King

There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he? —
Stephen King

You need to take out the stuff that's just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler! —
Stephen King

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader. —
Stephen King

Writing is a solitary job, and should be taken to someone who believes in you. —
Stephen King

I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't. —
Stephen King

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. —
Stephen King

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

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

Pop culture writing is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Literature is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. —
Stephen King

Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read. —
Jason Henderson

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

I wasn't alone in my belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven. —
Stephen King

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

I wonder if Stephen King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot rise. —
Stephen King

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

The truth is that most writers are needy. —
Stephen King

Writing fiction ... is no job for intellectual cowards. —
Stephen King

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that. —
Stephen King

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

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest. —
Stephen King

For me writing has always been best when it's intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. —
Stephen King

Fiction is the truth inside the lie. —
Stephen King

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly. —
Stephen King

He was after all, a novelist ... and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay. —
Stephen King

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. —
Stephen King

Stephen King once told me he liked my writing. And that was great. —
Nelson DeMille

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time. —
Stephen King

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life. —
Stephen King

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

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

Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky. —
Stephen King

It is the tale, not he who tells it. —
Stephen King

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it. —
Stephen King

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

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

Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off autocannibalism. —
Stephen King

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work. —
Stephen King

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

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar. —
Stephen King

I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. —
Stephen King

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

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

I have a real problem with bloat
I write like fat ladies diet. —
Stephen King

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it. —
Stephen King

Don't wait for the muse. —
Stephen King

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

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

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

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

Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft. —
Stephen King

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

But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped. —
Stephen King

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

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. —
Stephen King

No more obsessive writing, either, accumulating notebook after notebook like little piles of rabbit turds scattered along a woodland trail. —
Stephen King

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. —
Stephen King

...there will always be books. ... Books are real objects. Books are friends. ... They're also ideas and emotions. —
Stephen King

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. —
Stephen King

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. —
Stephen King