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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born 21 September 1947) American writer
Sourced:
- If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
- Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
- The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
- Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
- "The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. . . . Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers--common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."
- Source On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
- The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revalations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
- Source: Different Seasons, The Body
The Green Mile (1996)
Originally published in a serialized edition with six parts: The Two Dead Girls, The Mouse on the Mile, Coffey's Hands, The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix, Night Journey, and Coffey on the Mile
- There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball.
- He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you knew he wasn't going to do anything like that.
- "Your name is John Coffey."
"Yes, sir, boss, like the drink only not spelled the same way."
- "I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I cain't."
- "He kill them with they love", John said. "They love for each other. You see how it was?" I nodded, incapable of speech.
He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. "That's how it is every day", he said, "all over the worl'."
Attributed
- Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.
- Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
- Get busy living, or get busy dying.
- He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?
- I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.
- I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses.
- I've taken off two months, three months, at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed.
- If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
- It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
- People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
- (Originally said by Robert Bloch, as King has mentioned when quoting it.)
- Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
- The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window.
- The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
- The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.
- The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
- When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."
- You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
- You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.
- I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.
- Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.
See also
External links
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