Katie Wilson > Katie's Quotes

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― 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

“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

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
― 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

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”
― 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

“Words have weight.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“This country is terribly cruel to people who don’t fit in neat little boxes.”
― Bart Yates, The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl

“yet if the war had taught me anything, it was that barbarism was universal.”
― Bart Yates, The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl