Stephen King Quotes

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.

Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

Disney is thrilling and informative and important and beautiful and suspect. Butts was a detail I observed later and definitely ties in. I suppose I was programmed, yeah.

We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

The Pulpit, the Press, and the Novel—these undisputedly are the great molders of public opinion and public morals to-day.

Television really has been responsible for everything that I've done successfully.

I definitely feel that films and TV shows can bring about social change.

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.

TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.

I don't think films in and of themselves create radical change, but I think a film can contribute to people's understanding and deepen their understanding and help contribute to a shift.

I do think American culture has shifted a little bit away from the contemplative more toward the visual, more toward the emotional, and more toward the expressive. I don't think there's a lot that can be done about that. We just have to understand that it's the product of technology and of the way people live now.

When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.

I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

I think that from the very beginning it wasn't simply, what made Playboy so popular was not simply the naked ladies, what made the magazine so popular was, there was a point of view in the magazine, that you couldn't run nude pictures without some kind of rational that they were art.