Night Shift

by Stephen King

Compulsive diligence is almost enough. But not quite. You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people.

You read everything with grinding envy or a weary contempt.

Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about. It can happen in any dimension – physical, mental, spiritual – and in combinations of those dimensions.

Without author intrusion.

I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write. So each day I sift the sludge anew, going through the cast-off bits and pieces of observation, of memory, of speculation, trying to make something out of the stuff that didn’t go through the filter and down the drain into the subconscious.

No need to belabour the obvious; life is full of horrors small and large, but because the small ones are the ones we can comprehend, they are the ones that smack home with all the force of mortality.

Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there.

for a moment his Adam’s apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick.

Martin poured him a two-ounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp.

His eyes held all the miserable secrets of whisky.

he looked like he’d just kissed the wrong end of the baby.

Seven or eight heavy trucks were out there, engines rumbling in low, idling roars that sounded like big cats purring.

female . . . or so it seemed to me. It was as if our little school was caught between them, squeezed in some crazy lover’s embrace, part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood.

Harold looked around and saw the lawnmower man’s mechanized familiar advancing through the door.

Ectoplasmic music

He stands maybe six foot four, and his shoulders are heroic.