Every birth is a getting to know.
You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.
You have only so many chances to tell stories. I didn't want to be forever wedded to one form of storytelling when there are so many out there.
'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.
I started writing as soon as I started reading.
I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish.
I've never really found inspiration for story ideas in the news, but I'd say it certainly affects our lives in so many ways. I would say that certainly the stories of the day appear in the work - I just have never gone so far as to say, well, this particular event could influence a plot of an entire book.
When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant. "This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said. "My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!
49 and holding. Holding tight! Fighting that heinous age every step of the way.
When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, "But why do you want to build an amusement park? They're so dirty. " I told her that was just the point - mine wouldn't be.
When you read Boethius and some of the Renaissance philosophers, they talk a lot about the other spheres. There's a music of the spheres. There's a music that's actually in the universe, they believed, that's out there in different dimensions.