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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft quotes
Stephen King
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(54)
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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“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.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you...”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“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.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books—of course!”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“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. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something...”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap—just ask my critics, who will moan about entire Canadian forests massacred in order to print my drivel.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead”
Stephen King
,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
view all 54 quotes
Related topics
writing
reading
books
magic
story
creativity
life
loneliness
imagination
art
boredom
comparison
talent
support
enrichment
aptitude
description
idea
editing
vocabulary
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