Stephen King Quotes

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.

I've always felt you unearth story, like you're on an archeological dig.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I've made it.

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen. In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.