"Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories."
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Quote collection
Stephen King quotes (page 22 of 68)
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"Terror. When you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you-you hear it-you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around there’s nothing there."
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"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
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"What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again."
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"The worst advice? 'Don't listen to the critics.' I think that you really ought to listen to the critics, because sometimes they're telling you something is broken that you can fix."
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"I looked at the ceiling and wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries. That's what Wire man says."
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"Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad."
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"Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? 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 new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."
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"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."
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"It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family."
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"We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why."
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"If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?"
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"Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy."
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"I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose."
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"I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister."
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"I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters."
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"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."
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"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?"
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"She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship."
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"Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end."
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