Stephen King Quotes

I have said many times-if I hadn't been exposed to music as a child I don't think I would have been president.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

I do believe that people who write for children are deeply connected to their own childhood.

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

I tended not to be concerned about whether a song was going to be a hit when I wrote it. Because it became evident that none of us knew what was a hit and what wasn't. So I thought if I just write what I like, why shouldn't people like what I like?

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last. Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

There's always stuff to write about. So it's very gratifying on a lot of levels. This is stuff I got asked over and over again, or heard about. People would ask me about it, but they kind of knew the answer. It would be this ongoing question: "Your fans are wondering, now that you're married, are you still going to be able to write songs?" I'm serious! I would get asked that!

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.

I am a storyteller from a personal viewpoint. When I run out of people I invent ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. Never saw one.

I think when you write songs, you write about people... People are the source of my material. And London is a wonderful place to be for people. So, the next time you're sitting in a park somewhere, and you see someone like me looking at you, don't phone the police. I'm just writing

I have a bit of a bucolic kind of upbringing, and so I certainly bring an amalgamation of different people that I've met over the course of my life, especially before moving to Los Angeles, so I guess my childhood was my homework in a lot of ways for Harlan County.

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

I can't write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don't never write for myself.

I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

I don't know if I've ever written anything that's not a bill! I do write stories but I don't put a stamp on them. I wrote a story for my wife over Christmas and gave it to her as a present because she asked me to, but I don't put a stamp on things and send them to people.

I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.

People seemed to think, you get to a certain age or you get married or you, you're comfortable. And so now there's nothing to write about: that angst is gone. The youthful angst. And that just hasn't happened with me.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.