Stephen King

It's better to be good than evil but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

I'm still in love with what I do with the idea of making things up so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in it's all there at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people really smart people about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

People want to know why I do this why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career but the more you write the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

When asked "How do you write?" I invariably answer "one word at a time."

I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you things that are unresolved the more that you talk about them write about them the less serious they become.

If you don't have the time to read you don't have the time or the tools to write.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Whatever came to mind whatever came to hand I would read.

I guess when you turn off the main road you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

Only enemies speak the truth, friends and lovers lie endlessly caught in the web of duty.

I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment the capacity to believe or at some point in your life when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself you simply make an agreement.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in it's all there at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

And poets in my view and I think the view of most people do speak God's language - it's better it's finer it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Well I'm like a drug addict I'm always saying I'm going to stop and then I don't what I've said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.

If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of no shortcut.

What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor the education of its young the repair of its failing infrastructure the repayment of its staggering war debts.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.