Stephen King - Write Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

View all Stephen King Quotes
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.

Stephen King
I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

Stephen King
The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

Stephen King
Constant reading will pull you into a place - a mind-set, if you like the phrase - where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.

Stephen King
Anywhere in New York, anywhere in the country, somewhere there's going to be a Coke sign. People identify with Coke. You can write a novel about New York and people from the country will read it if they feel that you've made them familiar with New York.

Stephen King
Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.

Stephen King
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don't you? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

Stephen King
You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think—I did—that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

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

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..

Stephen King
So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

Stephen King
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

Stephen King
I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for a while in the morning's clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.
Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

Stephen King
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Stephen King
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 write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Stephen King
He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Stephen King
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
Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It's night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it's blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it's on, and so let's talk very honestly about fear. Let's talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madnessand perhaps over the edge.

Stephen King
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Stephen King
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

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

Stephen King
When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story, he said. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Stephen King
All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

Stephen King
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Stephen King
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 know that.

Stephen King