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When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Stephen King

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Stephen King
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: September 21
Actor
Author
Columnist
Director
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Teacher
Television Producer
Writer
Portland
Maine
Stephen Edwin King
Richard Bachman
John Swithen
Stories
Everything
Take
Writing
Rewrite
Story
Write
Tell

More quotes by Stephen King

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Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
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Love isn't soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.
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A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.
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no one dies happy, you can only die well
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Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.
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Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.
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I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.
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And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.
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Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up
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The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him.
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You say true, I say thankya.
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As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
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Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.
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Was it pretty? Your country. . .your land? It was beautiful, the gunslinger said. There were fields and forests and rivers and mists in the morning. But that's only pretty. My mother used to say that the only real beauty is order and love and light.
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Ka was a wheel it was also a net from which none ever escaped.
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At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
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There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.
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...stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position.
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It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
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If you want to play, you gotta pay.
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