Stephen King

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

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 society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.

I go out to my little office, where I've got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it's like getting on a taxiway. I'm able to go through and revise it and put myself back into that world.

This machine just called me an asshole.

I attract weirdness, you know, I'm like a weirdness magnet. And I was so weirded out by that point after all these, you know, rubber chicken dinners and everything else that I wasn't even surprised. Here he is, orange hair, orange shoes, the whole nine yards, he sits down next to me, this is years ago, plane takes off, no smoking light goes off, he pulls out a pack of Kents, lights up, Ronald lights up a cigarette, yeah, a Kent and he orders a gin and tonic.

It's more blessed to give than receive, Conan.

I was going to have a gravestone that said not in my lifetime. Right, but uh somebody sent me a t-shirt at the end of last year that said 'Now I can die in peace.' That's very nice, I thought was really nice and I'm going to wear that t-shirt. But hopefully I won't die for a long time, and I can see that happen two or three more times, it doesn't look that good this year right now. But yeah, well you never know, I mean, are you one of those people who's like happy now that it happened?

You know it's funny you should say that, because I was just thinking the other day, isn't it weird, your own farts smell better than anybody else's.

I make all this shit up and people pay me. It's great, you know, thank you. All right so you guys put my kids through college and I scared the shit out of you while I was doing it. It's terrific. It's a win-win.

I don't mean to put down anybody's taste but they were all lovey-dovey, you know, and he got all sparkly. So that kind of spoiled that.

Moxy, oh my God, yes, Moxy, don't even get me started on Moxy, that stuff sucks. So bad.

And I said 'Yes I am.' Because everybody who does this, you, me, everybody else who does this, we're fucking liars. You know how do you know we're lying? Our mouths are moving.

If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you're under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business...

What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies? (You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork... a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old).