This is an excerpt from an interview originally published in the fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review. You can read the full piece in a new book, The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2 (Picador: 2007).

Stephen King began this interview in the summer of 2001 in Boston, where King, an avid Red Sox fan, had taken up temporary residence. A second interview session with King was conducted in 2006 at his winter home [on Casey Key] in Florida, which happens to be within easy driving distance of the Red Sox’s spring training compound in Fort Myers. The house lies at the end of a sandy key, and looks—by virtue of a high vaulted ceiling— something like an overturned sailboat.
It was a hot, sunny morning, and King sat on his front steps in blue jeans, white sneakers and a Tabasco hot sauce T-shirt, reading the local newspaper. The day before, the same paper had printed his home address in the business section, and fans had been driving by all morning. “People forget,” he said. “I’m a real person.”

King was born on Sept. 22, 1947, in Portland, Maine. His father abandoned his family when King was very young, and his mother moved around the country before settling back in Maine. King’s first published story, “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” appeared in 1965 in a fan magazine called Comics Review. Around that time he received a scholarship to attend the University of Maine in Orono, where he met his wife, Tabitha, a novelist with whom he has three children and to whom he is still married. For several years, he struggled to support his young family by washing motel linens at a laundry, teaching high-school English and occasionally selling short stories to men’s magazines. Then, in 1973, he sold his novel Carrie, which quickly became a best seller. Since then, King has sold over three hundred million books.

In person, King has a gracious, funny, sincere manner and speaks with great enthusiasm and candor. He is also a generous host. Halfway through the interview he served lunch: a roasted chicken—which he proceeded to hack at with a frighteningly sharp knife—potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni salad and, for dessert, Key lime pie. When asked what he was currently working on, he stood up and led the way to the beach that runs along his property. He explained that two other houses once stood at the end of the key. One of them collapsed during a storm five years earlier, and bits of wall, furniture and personal effects still wash ashore at high tide. King is setting his next novel in the other house. It is still standing, though it is, undoubtedly, haunted.

Q: How old were you when you started writing? Believe it or not, I was about six or seven, just copying panels out of comic books and then making up my own stories. I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time. And I loved the movies from the start. I can remember my mother taking me to Radio City Music Hall to see Bambi. Whoa, the size of the place and the forest fire in the movie—it made a big impression. So when I started to write, I had a tendency to write in images because that was all I knew at the time.

Q: In On Writing, you mention how the idea for your first novel, Carrie, came to you when you connected two unrelated subjects: adolescent cruelty and telekinesis. Are such unlikely connections often a starting point for you? Yes, that’s happened a lot. When I wrote Cujo—about a rabid dog—I was having trouble with my motorcycle, and I heard about a place I could get it fixed. The mechanic had a farmhouse and an auto shop across the road. So I took my motorcycle up there, and when I got it into the yard, it quit entirely. And the biggest Saint Bernard I ever saw in my life came out of that garage, and it came toward me…He started growling at me, way down in his throat: arrrrrrrggggggghhhhh….

The mechanic came out of the garage and said to me, Oh, that’s Bowser or whatever the dog’s name was. Don’t worry about him. So I put my hand out to the dog, and the dog went for my hand. The guy had one of those socket wrenches in his hand, and he brought it down on the dog’s hindquarters. The dog just yelped once and sat down. And the guy said something to me like, Bowser usually doesn’t do this, he must not have liked your face. Right away it’s my fault.
I was worried about my wife getting stuck in [a Ford Pinto they owned with mechanical problems], and I thought, What if she took that car to get fixed like I did my motorcycle and the needle valve stuck and she couldn’t get it going—but instead of the dog just being a mean dog, what if the dog was really crazy?

Then I thought, maybe it’s rabid. That’s when something really fired over in my mind. Once you’ve got that much, you start to see all the ramifications of the story.

Q: What do you think it is that we’re afraid of? I don’t think there’s anything that I’m not afraid of, on some level. But if you mean, what are we afraid of, as humans? Chaos. The outsider. We’re afraid of change. We’re afraid of disruption, and that is what I’m interested in.

Q: Do you think about which of your books will last? It’s a crapshoot. You never know who’s going to be popular in 50 years. If I had to predict which of my books people will pick up a hundred years from now, if they pick up any, I’d begin with The Stand and The Shining. And Salem’s Lot—because people like vampire stories.

Q: How important are your surroundings when you write? It’s nice to have a desk, a comfortable chair so you’re not shifting around all the time, and enough light. Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

My study is basically just a room where I work. I have a filing system. It’s very complex, very orderly. With Duma Key—the novel I’m working on now—I’ve actually codified the notes to make sure I remember the different plot strands. Because if I do something wrong now, it becomes such a pain in the ass to fix later.

Q: Don’t you also like to listen to loud music when you work? Not anymore. When I sit down to write, my job is to move the story. If people read me because they’re getting a story that’s paced a certain way, it’s because they sense I want to get to where I’m going. I don’t want to dawdle around and look at the scenery. To achieve that pace I used to listen to music. But I was younger then, and frankly my brains used to work better than they do now. Now I’ll only listen to music at the end of a day’s work, when I roll back to the beginning of what I did that day and go over it on the screen. A lot of times, the music will drive my wife crazy because it will be the same thing over and over again. I used to have a dance mix of that song that goes “A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Erica—deega, deega, deega.” It’s a cheerful, calypso kind of thing, and my wife came upstairs one day and said, Steve, one more time…you die!

Q: You have written a lot about children. Why? I was fortunate to sell my writing fairly young, and I married young and had children young. Naomi was born in 1971, Joe in 1972 and Owen in 1977. So I had a chance to observe them at a time when a lot of my contemporaries were out dancing to KC and the Sunshine Band. I feel that I got the better part of that deal. I didn’t know KC and the Sunshine Band, but I knew my kids in and out. I was in touch with the anger and the exhaustion that you can feel. And those things went into my books because they were what I knew at that time. What has found its way into a lot of the recent books is pain and people who have injuries, because that’s what I know right now. Ten years from now, maybe it’ll be something else, if I’m still around.

Q: Do you ever feel typed by your reputation? If you mean, do I feel like I’m blocked in and I can’t go where I want to go—not at all. Other people will hang tags on me like the horrormeister, the schlockmeister, the fearmeister, the master of suspense, the master of horror. But I’ve never said what it is that I do, and I don’t write letters complaining about these tags.

Q: The relationship of your writing to money is now, I assume, beyond a sense of survival. Does it still mean anything to you? I think you should be paid for what you do. Every morning I wake up to the alarm clock, do my leg exercises, and then sit down at the word processor. By noon my back aches and I’m tired out. I work as hard or harder than I used to, so I want to be paid. But basically, at this point, it’s how you keep score.

Q: It’s now been seven years since the accident [when King was struck and critically injured by a minivan while walking in Maine]. Are you still in pain? Yes. All the time. But I don’t take anything for it anymore. I had to be hospitalized with pneumonia a couple of years ago, another operation, and after that it got to a point where I realized that I couldn’t go on taking medication forever, because I’d have to be loading it on by the boxcar. At that time I’d been taking painkillers for five years. Percocet, OxyContin, all that stuff. I was addicted. If you’re using it for pain and not using it to get high, it isn’t terribly difficult to quit. You go through withdrawal. Mostly it’s insomnia. But after a while your body says, Oh, all right!

Q: Do you still smoke cigarettes? Three a day, and never when I write. I kicked booze, Valium, cocaine. Those were all the things that I was hooked on. The only thing that I could not kick was cigarettes. Usually I have one in the morning, one at night, one in the afternoon. I do enjoy my cigarettes. And I shouldn’t. I know, I know. Smoking, bad! Health, good! But I sure do like to kick back with a good book and a cigarette. I was thinking this the other night. I came back from the ball game; the Red Sox won. And I was lying on the bed reading The Quiet American by Graham Greene. It’s a terrific, terrific book. I’m smoking a cigarette, and I’m thinking, Who’s got it better than me?

Cigarettes, all those addictive substances are part of the bad side of what we do. I think it’s part of that obsessive deal that makes you a writer in the first place, that makes you want to write it all down. Booze, cigarettes, dope.

Q: Does that mean that writing is a kind of addiction? I think it is. Even when the writing is not going well, if I don’t do it, the fact that I’m not doing it nags at me. Writing is a wonderful thing to be able to do. When it goes well, it’s fantastic, and when it doesn’t go so well, it’s only OK, but it’s still a great way to pass the time. And you have all these novels to show for it.

Q: Do you still go to AA? Yes. I try to go on a regular basis.

Q: How do you feel about the religious aspect of it? I don’t have a problem with that at all. It says in the program, if you don’t believe, pretend that you do. Fake it till you make it, they say. I follow the program. I get down on my knees in the morning and say, God help me not to think of drink and drugs. And I get down on my knees at night and say, Thank you that I didn’t have to drink or use.

Q: Now that you’ve been published in The New Yorker and been honored with a National Book Award and other international awards, it seems pretty clear that you’re taken more seriously than you were earlier in your career. Do you still feel a strong sense of exclusion from the literary establishment? It has changed a lot. You know what happens? If you have a little talent and you try to maximize it and you don’t give in or settle, then you’re taken more seriously. People who have grown up reading you become part of the literary establishment. In some ways you get a squarer shake…

The other major thing is that you get older. I’m pushing 60 now. I might have another 10 creative years left, maybe 15. I say to myself, I’ve got this amount of time, can I do something that’s even better? I don’t need the money. I don’t need another movie based on one of my books. I don’t need to write another screenplay. I don’t need another big, butt-ugly house to live in—I have this one. I’d like not to repeat myself. I’d like not to do shoddy work. But I’d like to keep working. I reject the idea that I’ve explored everything in the room.