Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin Kingis an American author of contemporary horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television shows, and comic books. King has published 54 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and six non-fiction books. He has written nearly 200 short stories, most of which have been collected in book collections. Many of his stories are set in...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 September 1947
CityPortland, ME
There are a lot of people in the field [ of horror stories] that I do read. There is a lot of stuff that is written in this field, though, that is not very good. You just have to look for the good stuff.
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.
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
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.
She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.
I and everyone else in this world live in what is probably the most difficult times that have ever been. We are facing total thermonuclear destruction; and, if you can make someone believe in a ghost or a demon or a vampire in the face of that, you are doing well. From my own personal point of view, I don't think just blood and guts is enough. At least, it isn't for me. Maybe it will turn someone's stomach; but, I'm not sure that is literature or even entertainment.
Art should be a place of hope.
Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.
May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.
Scaring people, especially in our day and time, is one of the hardest things on earth, as far as I am concerned.
The most important things are the hardest to say
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read
I simply think that there are things in this world that are relics. We have unsettling remnants of Atlantis. They have found things off Bermuda, great walls and things of that sort. This seems to indicate that there were races and cultures that went before us. And to me, that's an unsettling idea.