Stephen King

“you must not come lightly to the blank page.”

“Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this!...”

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.”

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.”

“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”

“As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to...”

“He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.”

“The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about g...”

“Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip:...”

“When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.”

“As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?”

“The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.”

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite so...”

“No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I kn...”

“‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away...”

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

“The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.”

“I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.”