Welcome to this tiny little corner of Charnel House we like to call Spare Parts. Forget the fact that I wrote a book by that title (okay, don't forget it - check out my author page and revel in the egotism). This page will collect all the miscellaneous oddities in the land of King - the Vermont Speech, the Riding the Bullet stuff, and more. All the stuff that didn't seem to fit in other places, well, you'll find it here. Enjoy, kids!
Short article on King being the most pirated author on the internet.
The Weapon
By STEPHEN KING
People keep saying ‘‘like a movie,’’ ‘‘like a book,’’ ‘‘like a war zone,’’ and I keep thinking: No, not at all like a movie or a book — that’s no computer-generated image, because you can’t see any wash or blur in the background. This is what it really looks like when an actual plane filled with actual human beings and loaded with jet fuel hits a skyscraper. This is the truth.
Certainly, it seems to me that the idea of an enormous intelligence breakdown is ludicrous; again, this was not like a book, not like a movie; this was men armed with nothing but knives and box cutters relying on simple speed to keep people off balance long enough to accomplish their goals. In the case of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, they failed. With the other three, however, they succeeded quite nicely. Cost of weaponry? Based on what we know now, less than $100. This qualifies them as cut-rate, low-tech, stealth guerrillas flying well under the radar of American intelligence. We must realize this and grasp an even more difficult truth: although it is comforting to have a bogyman, and every child’s party needs a paper donkey to pin the tail on, this Osama bin Laden fellow may not have been the guy responsible. It wouldn’t hurt to remember that the boys who shot up Columbine High School planned to finish their day by hijacking a jetliner and flying it into — yes, that’s right — the World Trade Center. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris weren’t exactly rocket scientists, and the guys who did this didn’t have to be either. All you had to be was willing to die, and these guys were. It could happen again. And now that crazos the world over see that it’s possible to get 72 hours of uninterrupted air time on a budget, it will almost certainly happen again.
...Stephen King said he had no illusions about the power of fiction, prophetic, healing or otherwise. "Writers, football players, actors, singers, we get paid to play for other people," he said. "I wasn't ever going to — quote — make the world a better place."
A novelist of prodigious output, Mr. King was getting started on his morning's work when the news came on the television. "I thought, I can't do this," he said. But "even if I couldn't work, it doesn't matter because what I do has absolutely no significance," he added.
So he went up to his office and stuffed earphones into his ears to block out the sound of the television that his wife, Tabitha, had on downstairs. "I did get work done," Mr. King said.
And he is continuing to write through the tragedy, he said, "not because I want to contribute, but if everybody continues working, they" — the terrorists — "don't win."
Mr. King couldn't resist an analogy to Monday night's baseball game between the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies. "The baseball players went back to work last night," he said on Tuesday. "Chipper Jones hit a home run in the first inning, and the Philadelphia fans booed him. That's their job. And the audience is getting back to work, too."