Night Shift

by Stephen King

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.

Then you have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.

He does not write to please you. He writes to please himself. I write to please myself. When that happens, you will like the work too.

Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat.

No need to belabor 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.

And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.

When you read horror, you don't really believe what you read. You don't believe in vampires, werewolves, trucks that suddenly start up and drive themselves. The horrors that we all do believe in are of the sort that Dostoyevsky and Albee and MacDonald write about: hate, alienation, growing lovelessly old, tottering out into a hostile world on the unsteady legs of adolescence. We are, in our real everyday worlds, often like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, grinning on the outside, grimacing on the inside.

These are some of the things I feel that the horror story does, but I am firmly convinced that it must do one more thing, this above all others: It must tell a tale that holds the reader or the listener spellbound for a little while, lost in a world that never was, never could be.

that there are spiritually noxious places, buildings where the milk of the cosmos has become sour and rancid.

love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.

When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell.

The ladder had always held us before, we thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.

Spring is the only season when nostalgia never seems to turn bitter,