Stephen King on being a huge rock’n’roll fan:

"I always find new things to listen to. I just downloaded a great... but you know it’s funny, I think of what I’m going to say, what I just downloaded that I’m crazy about is a live album of a Raspberries reunion concert in Beverly Hills, and the Raspberries were a pop group, power pop group in the 70’s, and they’re all looking their age, they sound great. But you know, the new Steve Earl record is great. That’s an album by The Thrills, that’s really great. So I find stuff to listen to but rock’n’roll is now the new jazz. It’s divided up into a lot of different areas, and it’s become a specialty taste. It’s played on specialty stations, college FMs, that sort of thing. There’s no more mainstream rock as we know it so that if the Rolling Stones or Tom Petty release a new record on your local FM that has this spuriously friendly name of a man, it would be like 'Frank FM,' you know, 'Jack FM,' whatever... They’ll play 'No Satisfaction' and then they’ll say in passing, 'Oh. by the way, the Stones have a new record, but we’re not going to play it because we know you only want to hear that old sh*t.' So... there you are. But yeah, rock’s okay. I listen to a lot more, sort of, all country now because it’s sort of like the rock that I remember, but it’s new. People like Ray Wiley Hubbard, and Cross Canadian Ragweed. People like that."

King on whether he'll ever direct again:

"I’d never say never. I think it would be great sometime to direct a movie when I wasn’t cocked and drunk out of my mind and see what came out. But, I’m not - I’m not crazy to do it. But what I miss, okay, what I really regret is Frank asked me if I would act in The Mist, and I for one reason or another I wasn’t able to do it. But damn, I kick myself."

How how his homes in Florida and Maine have impacted the settings in his work:

"Well, the new book has a Florida setting, but we’ve been going back and forth to Florida ten years and I still feel tentative about it. It takes a while to get the texture of a place, and so I’ve kind of get my, you know, mental blast shield down about that. But writers... Richard Matheson was the first one who really influenced me. Robert Block was another one. Today Jack Ketchum, Bentley Little, - I read across a wide spectrum. I don’t just read horror, that would be kind of boring. But there are a lot of different people that I really like. Kelly Link is great. I really like Kelly Link. She doesn’t work that field specifically but I like her stuff a lot."

King and his thoughts on the state of horror today, ie: "The Splat Pack":

"I’m not dissatisfied with The Splat Pack. I mean I can’t wait to go see P2. I’m excited to see P2. I was excited to see Halloween - the remake of Halloween - Hostel 2 I was there the first day that baby opened. It’s like every other kind of movie, there’s some I like and some of them I don’t, but in a lot of cases it feels to me like I’m not dealing with reality, that I’m dealing with some sub-genre where everybody knows it’s almost like a Japanese Noh play. I feel like I know what’s going to happen, okay, even if on some level I don’t exactly. This is going to happen, that is going to happen, and it’s going to have The Sixth Sense snapper at the end, or whatever, and they don’t, a lot of times they don’t feel like the work of grown-ups. They feel like the work of people who are still just sort of learning the telling [of] more textured story."

Stephen King on whether he ever imagined he be so successful:

"No, I could have never imagined it, and I never did. The only thing that I wanted was to support myself and my family without teaching school by doing what I love and know how to do, which is telling stories. And the rest of this is the bonus round."