An Interview with Stephen King

My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. That's a head reaction. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind. It is the sort of effect that Edgar Allen Poe gets in his story, The Tel…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Terror Stephen King Horror Edgar Allen Poe The Telltale Heart

Scaring people, especially in our day and time, is one of the hardest things on earth, as far as I am concerned. You and I and everyone else in this world live in what is probably the most difficult times that have ever been. We are facing total thermonuclear destruction; and, if you can make someon…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Horror Writing Literature How to be a writer Horror Movies

I like to write short stories more because I never met a writer who wasn't lazy. And a short story is, by its very definition, short. It is something that generally you can turn out in a week to two weeks depending on how well it goes for you. But, at the same time, it gives the same satisfaction of…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Writing How to be a writer Story short stories

I like to think that good people win. But even good people have other sides. Most people will slow down to get a good look at an accident, even though they won't admit it. I think most of us are fascinated by the macabre and by the weird and even the nastiness that comes along.

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Horror Good vs. Evil Evil macabre

I was still in college when Night Of The Living Dead came out, and when I went to see it the first time, I went in the afternoon. The place was full of kids, mostly from five to eleven. I have never in my life, from the time I was a kid until now, been in an audience where children were so quiet. Th…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Horror zombies night of the living dead Cinema

As far as where I go when I die, the concept that I am simple going to flick out, like a light bulb, to me is not only spiritually impossible to believe, but logically it is laughable -- the idea that we simply die and nothing happens. Now, as to what does go on, that is something else. I am religio…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Horror Reincarnation Death Life After Death

I am interested in it and I think now in the latter half of the twentieth century we have enough documentation so that anyone that doubts the psychic experience is an actual empiric reality is on the level with a person who continues to smoke two or three packs of cigarettes a day and denies that th…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King ESP Ghosts Paranormal Horror

I would NOT participate in one under any circumstances. Not even if my wife died and a medium said she had a message from my wife. I cannot conceive of circumstances under which I would participate in that sort of thing or stay overnight in a house that was reputed to be haunted or any of those thin…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Ghosts Haunted Houses haunting Paranormal

I get most of my good ideas after the sun has gone down and the dark is on the land.

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Horror How to be a writer Artists

It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblin…

— Stephen King, web.archive.org

Stephen King Writers Writing Books Horror

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