Quote

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

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
Words
Door
Write
Doors
Stuff
Goes
Rewrite
Stories
Wants
Belongs
Right
Open
Criticize
Writing
Anyone
Closed
Story
Starts
Read
Anyway

More quotes by Stephen King

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Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
Stephen King
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That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Stephen King
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and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
Stephen King
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I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.
Stephen King
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Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or leaving closed.
Stephen King
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Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.
Stephen King
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The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.
Stephen King
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Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.
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The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.
Stephen King
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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.
Stephen King
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The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn't beat up on them. Basically I don't think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.
Stephen King
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There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.
Stephen King
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One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Stephen King
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Let the word and the legend go before you. Let the world go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark. Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter.
Stephen King
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Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
Stephen King
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It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.
Stephen King
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When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Stephen King
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The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
Stephen King
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She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn't care which, she wad overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.
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There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.
Stephen King