Stephen King Quotes

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

When I set out to write 'Sanctus,' all I wanted to do was craft a piece of high quality entertainment.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Many authors write like amateur blacksmiths making their first horseshoe; the clank of the anvil, the stench of the scorched leather apron, the sparks and the cursing are palpable, and this appeals to those who rank "sincerity" very high. Nabokov is more like a master swordsmith making a fine blade; nothing is amiss, nothing is too much, there is no fuss, and the finished product must be handled with great care, or it will cut you badly.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

There are certainly a lot of people - and I won't name names - who are getting by simply on expression. And I guess that's valuable in some sense. But songs are not better just because they're emotionally honest. To write a song well, you have to put some work into it and grind it out.

I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

For writing, getting off our buts means getting on our butts-putting it into a chair and not moving from the chair for a set period of time.

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

Writing is an undertaking for the modest.