R.K. King Quotes

There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.

The quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

Isn't it too bad that the great truths are all such lies.

Zombies are the new vampire.

As a species we're fundamentally insane.

I'm convinced that FEAR is at the root, of all bad writing

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

Waiting rooms were made for books-of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone's favorite, the john.

Everyone needs a hobby, he said. And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

If you can read in the 21st century you own the world.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

...knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."

I've put men to death-men with supposedly immortal souls-that looked dumber than that mouse

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

When a man has died, he wants you to know about it.

It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

I started to submit when I was twelve, and obviously at that time they weren't good enough, and I suppose in my heart of hearts I knew it. But you have to start sooner or later, you have to dig in.

Pain is the biggest power of love.

It's a tough life if you don't weaken.

The past is obdurate. It doesn't want to change.

When the time is gone, you can never get it back.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

Understand death? Sure. That was when the monsters got you.

I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They're a way of relieving pressure.

This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day - will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.

...you need openness and inability to do anything other than get to the point.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

The situation comes first...the characters...come next...[then] begin to narrate.

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.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

Why does everyone think that I am a cruel and insensitive man? I mean, come on, I have kids... on my desk in little jars!

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.

The ghost story movie that scared me the most was The Changeling with George C. Scott. I think that's sometimes overlooked, but it's a wonderful piece of work.

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If it's OK to register cars and license drivers, why is it not OK to impose similar legal responsibilities on gun owners?

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

There seems to be no air in the air she breaths.

In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.