Quote collection
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"I don't really map anything out. I just let it happen [while writing]. But once it happens, it's always there. If it's laid, it's played. If I get to page 300 and it's not working, I junk it."
"I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer."
"The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around."
"I think what you do is, you keep your sensors open. And it's - the more that you do the job, the more you come to understand in a kind of intuitive way that you're always - you know, your radar is on. And the thing is going around and around and around. And it's not picking up any blips."
"I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in."
"I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can."
"The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun."
"I have two amazing things in my life: I'm pain-free and I'm debt-free."
"I wasn't a social drinker. I used to say that I didn't want to go to bars because they were full of assholes like me."
"I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out."
"It hurts to imagine stuff. It can give you a headache. Probably doesn't hurt physically, but it hurts mentally. But the more that you can do it, the more you're able to get out of it. Everybody has that capacity, but I don't think everyone develops it."
"I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it."
"The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's."
"I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to."
"You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy."
"Showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don't want to do any of that."
"I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't."
"Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that."
"The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing."
"The world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever."