Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview

Did you relay any of your doubts to your mother?
Jesus, no! I loved her. I never would have done that. Once I got through high school, that was it for me. When you see somebody like Jimmy Swaggart and he’s supposed to be this great minister touched by God, and he’s paying whores because he wants to look up their dresses, it’s just all hypocrisy.

All that said, you’ve made it clear over the years that you still believe in God.
Yeah. I choose to believe in God because it makes things better. You have a meditation point, a source of strength. I don’t ask myself, “Well, does God exist or does God not exist?” I choose to believe that God exists, and therefore I can say, “God, I can’t do this by myself. Help me not to take a drink today. Help me not to take a drug today.” And that works fine for me.

Do you believe in the afterlife?
I don’t know. I’m totally agnostic on that one. Let’s put it this way, I would like to believe that there is some sort of an afterlife. I do believe that when we’re in the process of dying, that all these emergency circuits in the brain take over. I base what I’m saying not on any empirical evidence. I think it’s very possible that when you’re dying, these circuits open up, which would explain this whole white-light phenomena – when people clinically die and they see their relatives and stuff and say, “Hello, it’s great to see you.”

Do you hope to go to heaven?
I don’t want to go to the heaven that I learned about when I was a kid. To me, it seems boring. The idea that you’re going to lounge around on a cloud all day and listen to guys play harps? I don’t want to listen to harps. I want to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis!

Do you wish you had stronger beliefs? Would that give you comfort if you had more certainty?
No, I think uncertainty is good for things. Certainty breeds complacency and complacency means that you just sit somewhere in your nice little comfortable suburban house in Michigan, looking at CNN and saying, “Oh, those poor immigrant children that are all coming across the border. But we really can’t have them here – that isn’t what God wants. Let’s send them all back to the drug cartels.” There’s a complacency to it.

How about evil? Do you believe there is such a thing?
I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or whether it all comes from inside and that it’s all part of genetics and environment. When you find somebody like, let’s say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes went back and had sex with the dead bodies, I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, “Oh, that’s because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four.” That behavior was hard-wired. Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there’s some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we’re able to address that issue, sooner or later, we’ll fucking kill ourselves.

Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.

What do you mean?
I read a thing on Huffington Post about a month ago that stayed with me. It was very troubling. It was a pop-science thing, which is all I can understand. It said we’ve been listening to the stars for 50 years, looking for any signs of life, and there’s been nothing but silence. When you see what’s going on in the world today, and you have all this conflict, and our technological expertise has far outraced our ability to manage our own emotions – you see it right now with ISIS – what’s the solution? The only solution we see with ISIS is to bomb the shit out of those motherfuckers so that they just can’t roll over the world. And that’s what’s scary about that silence – maybe all intelligent races hit this level of violence and technological advances that they can’t get past. And then they just puff out. You hit the wall and that’s it.

So you think humanity’s destiny is to someday wipe itself out?
I can’t see the future, but it’s grim. The depletion of resources – we’re living in this dine-and-dash economy. I love the Republicans, too. Whenever it comes to money – the national debt, for instance – they yell their heads off about “What about our grandchildren?” But when it comes to the environment, when it comes to resources, they’re like, “We’ll be OK for 40 years.”

I want to talk about writing now. Walk me through your typical day when you’re working on a book.
I wake up. I eat breakfast. I walk about three and a half miles. I come back, I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page that I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself – click – back into that world, whatever it is. I don’t spend the day writing. I’ll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I’ll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.

Do you do that every day?
Every day, even weekends. I used to write more and I used to write faster – it’s just aging. It slows you down a little bit.

Is writing an addiction for you?
Yeah. Sure. I love it. And it’s one of the few things where I do it less now and get as much out of it. Usually with dope and booze, you do it more and get less out of it as time goes by. It’s still really good, but it’s addictive, obsessive-compulsive behavior. So I’ll write every day for maybe six months and get a draft of something – and then I make myself stop completely for 10 days or 12 days in order to let everything settle. But during that time off, I drive my wife crazy. She says, “Get out of my way, get out of the house, go do something – paint a birdhouse, anything!”

So I watch TV, I play my guitar and put in time, and then when I go to bed at night, I have all these crazy dreams, usually not very pleasant ones because whatever machinery that you have that goes into writing stories, it doesn’t want to stop. So if it’s not going on the page, it has to go somewhere, and I have these mind dreams. They’re always dreams that focus on some kind of shame or insecurity. 

Like what?
The one that recurs is that I’m going to be in a play, and I get to the theater and it’s opening night and not only can I not find my costume, but I realize that I have never learned the lines.