Quote

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

Stephen King

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Formulas
Second
Firsts
First
Minus
Draft
Formula

More quotes by Stephen King

Image
I don't take notes I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.
Stephen King
Image
It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?
Stephen King
Image
Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.
Stephen King
Image
Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.
Stephen King
Image
Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.
Stephen King
Image
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway... You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I'm afraid, that Geraldo, Keith Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
Stephen King
Image
Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.
Stephen King
Image
Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.
Stephen King
Image
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Stephen King
Image
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
Stephen King
Image
The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.
Stephen King
Image
The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.
Stephen King
Image
I always felt that organized religion was just basically a theological insurance scam where they're saying if you spend time with us, guess what, you're going to live forever, you're going to go to some other plain where you're going to be so happy, you'll just be happy all the time, which is also kind of a scary idea to me.
Stephen King
Image
I tend to scare myself.
Stephen King
Image
I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.
Stephen King
Image
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Stephen King
Image
After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.
Stephen King
Image
And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.
Stephen King
Image
The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.
Stephen King
Image
Friends don’t spy true friendship is about privacy, too.
Stephen King