Quotes from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King, quote from 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, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

“Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him. ”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
― Stephen King, quote from 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, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

“Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”
― Stephen King, quote from 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, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”
― Stephen King, quote from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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“ready for whatever scooted out from under. The water was so deep I had my shortsleeve shirt rolled all the way up to my shoulders. I was aware of how long and skinny my arms must look to her. I know they looked that way to me. I felt pretty strange beside her, actually. Uncomfortable but excited. She was different from the other girls I knew, from Denise or Cheryl on the block or even the girls at school. For one thing she was maybe a hundred times prettier. As far as I was concerned she was prettier than Natalie Wood. Probably she was smarter than the girls I knew too, more sophisticated. She lived in New York City after all and had eaten lobsters. And she moved just like a boy. She had this strong hard body and easy grace about her. All that made me nervous and I missed the first one. Not an enormous crayfish but bigger than what we had. It scudded backward beneath the Rock. She asked if she could try. I gave her the”
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― Rosamund Hodge, quote from Cruel Beauty

“He smiled – a real smile. Damn. It was easier to deal with him when he was being thoroughly vile. "Look, I’m sorry for being so rude earlier today. Your presence came as something of a shock and I reacted badly."
"Oh." Geared for battle, his apology took me utterly by surprise. I gaped.
"Aunt Arabella spoke very highly of you," he added, heaping coals of fire on my head. "She was impressed by your work on the Purple Gentian."
"Why all this sudden amiability?" I asked suspiciously, crossing my arms across my chest.
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Colin rooted around in a cupboard above the sink for the cocoa tin and held it out to me to sniff. "See? Arsenic free."
I leant back against the counter, my elbows behind me on the marble work surface. "I don’t think arsenic is supposed to have a smell, is it?"
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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