Night Shift

by Stephen King

If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.

Because that is the way it is done. Because there is no other way to do it. Not one other way. 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. You save the most contempt for the people who conceal ineptitude with long words, Germanic sentence structure, obtrusive symbols, and no sense of story, pace, or character. 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.

Note this. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns funny. But once you know how, you can write in any area.

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.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.”

I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky.

I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write.

Fear is the emotion that makes us blind.

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

We are, in our real everyday worlds, often like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, grinning on the outside, grimacing on the inside.

“The Mark of the Beast was on him, although he walked in the clothes of the Lamb. And on the night of October 31, 1789, Philip Boone disappeared . . . and the entire populace of that damned village with him.”

So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu.

That night he had the dream again. The dream was always cruelly slow. There was time to see and feel everything. And there was the added horror of reliving events that were moving toward a known conclusion, as helpless as a man strapped into a car going over a cliff.

A man in a group encounter session he had attended had said having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn't put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue.

“Dark Father, hear me for my soul's sake. I am one who promises sacrifice. I am one who begs a dark boon for sacrifice. I am one who seeks vengeance of the left hand. I bring blood in promise of sacrifice.”

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.

She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit.

Something had happened in 1964. Something to do with religion, and corn . . . and children.

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.

People move around so much now, and it's funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations.

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

None of it seemed real, none of it seemed to matter.

Spring trembled on the edge of summer, and in the city, summer is the season of dreams.

Maine blizzard—ever been out in one? The snow comes flying so thick and fine that it looks like sand and sounds like that, beating on the sides of your car or pickup. You don't want to use your high beams because they reflect off the snow and you can't see ten feet in front of you. With the low beams on, you can see maybe fifteen feet. But I can live with the snow. It's the wind I don't like, when it picks up and begins to howl, driving the snow into a hundred weird flying shapes and sounding like all the hate and pain and fear in the world. There's death in the throat of a snowstorm wind, white death—and maybe something beyond death. That's no sound to hear when you're tucked up all cozy in your own bed with the shutters bolted and the doors locked. It's that much worse if you're driving. And we were driving smack into 'Salem's Lot.