Stephen King and Neil Gaiman are two of my favourite writers and probably the two biggest influence on my writing. So, understandably, I loved this piece in the Sunday Times this week where Gaiman interviewed King. You can read the whole thing below but I thought I’d draw attention to my favourite quote…

‘I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things’

And here’s the article in full…

The first time I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife, Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons, Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame.
“If I had my life over again,” said King. “I’d have done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn’t have done the American Express ‘Do You Know Me?’ TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.” He was tall and dark-haired, and Joe and Owen looked like younger clones of their father.
The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up on stage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made For Walkin’. Afterwards we talked in the tiny toilet in the back of the theatre, the only place King could smoke a furtive cigarette. He seemed frail, then, and grey, only recently recovered from a long stay in hospital after being hit by an idiot in a van, and the hospital infections that had followed it. He grumbled about the pain of walking downstairs. I worried about him, then. Read the rest of this entry »