Quotes from Owen King

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

My parents and my brother root for me.

The stock market is for people who live in Manhattan and summer in the Hamptons, for people who can afford fancy cars - a Mercedes, say.

I think I always wanna write comedy because that's what feels truest to me; it feels closest to life as I know it, so that's what I want to reproduce.

One corollary of the wretchedness of the second trilogy of 'Star Wars' films has been the final, demented sanctification of the first trilogy of films.

I suspect that perfect happiness is not possible for me. I suppose if I was ever selected for eternal life - the moment I was informed - that would bring me the closest.

My father has been a major force in the popular culture for a long, long time. He's a fascinating person.

My personal history is strewn with massive errors in judgment. They're all precious to me.

Who wouldn't be depressed living in a society that can't agree on reality, let alone health-care policy?

It's hard for me to teach and write my own work at the same time.

I think the model that I look at is someone like Jakob Dylan, whose dad is obviously every bit if not more famous than mine. He's a guy who sought to build a career on his own, doing something that's a little bit different than what his father does.

I give my work to my wife first to read. Then, I try to find new people who haven't read my work before, to get a new perspective.

I only finish probably one out of every ten things I start. I give up all the time.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

I like 'Reanimator,' and I like 'Evil Dead 2.' But I really like the Corman movies from the late '60s and early '70s, and my favorite is 'The Mask of Red Death' with Vincent Price because - spoiler alert - but at the end of the movie, Vincent Price, he's the evil prince, and to kill him, his court just, like, dances at him.

I find that I'm extremely unattracted to anything that's humorless. There is writing that is entirely serious, and it doesn't ring true to me, because I think, oftentimes, life is very, very funny. Even the worst, most humiliating, savage disappointments in retrospect have elements of bleak humor.

I didn't want to write a book as Stephen King's son, because all I did was get born, and that's not much of an accomplishment. If that was the reason my book was published, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. I wanted to do my own thing.

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

My first job was as a groundskeeper at the local ballpark in the town where I grew up. There was a lot of down time, and I got to drive tractor, so it was pretty good gig. I've also taught creative writing, dabbled in reviewing and journalism, and toiled as a screenwriter.

Comic books and films have a lot more in common than, say, comics and books or films and books. The two art forms, to me, seem like pretty close siblings.

I like some of the B movies that are intentionally funny.

It's not easy for me as a writer to suspend my disbelief in a fantastical zone. I can do it. But it's more natural for me to write stories that are comic. Or hopefully comic.

I didn't really get serious about my own writing until I was convinced it was something that I wanted to do, that I wanted to spend that much time alone.