"They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead."
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Quote collection
Stephen King quotes (page 27 of 68)
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader."
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"Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all."
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"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."
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"Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."
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"Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again."
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"Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books."
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"The only [working] ritual is making tea. I use the loose leaves and drink it by the gallon."
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"Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."
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"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
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"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one."
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"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."
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"I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time."
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"Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me"
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"Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules.""
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"Research can only present data about the past. No one seriously believes that people's answers to hypothetical questions about the future accurately represent their future behaviour; they merely represent a current attitude, which may or may not be translated into future behaviour."
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"But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it."
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"And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible."
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"I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe."
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"Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous."
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