Mia > Mia's Quotes

“We lie best when we lie to ourselves”
― Stephen King, It

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
Drink and be filled up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day... fifty the day after that... and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it....

It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft