Stephen King on Books

"He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity."

"He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to."

"Stephen King Book Reviews and Books on CD"

"Well, I don't like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn't work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that's another book that shows the drugs at work."

"There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but it's Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems-" "Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?" Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose. "One of the janitors." "Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we've got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I'm busy." "He says it's important, and he seems extremely upset." Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. "All right, send him in. But this had better be good." It wasn't. It was bad. Very."

"Lisey's Story. That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I'd never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there's still things that we don't know about each other."

"The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst—for me, at least—is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky."

"I leaned forward, gasping. Between my knees I could see every crack in the cement floor, every groove, every flash of mica. I looked up at the wall and saw names that had been written there in 1924, 1926, 1931. Those names had been washed away, the men who had written them had also been washed away, in a manner of speaking, but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy."