It's a couple of weeks old, but I did a search and didn't find anything. Pretty lengthy interview with Stephen King...fascinating stuff if you enjoy his books.

quote:
Switching gears, your new book Revival talks a lot about religion. Specifically, one of the two main characters is a reverend that turns on God when his family dies but also delivers a sermon about why religion is a complete fraud. How much of that sermon mirrors your own beliefs?
My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people. I grew up in a Methodist church, and we went to services every Sunday and to Bible school in the summer. We didn't have a choice. We just did it. So all that stuff about childhood religion in Revival is basically autobiographical. But as a kid, I had doubts. When I went to Methodist youth fellowship, we were taught that the Catholics were all going to go to hell because they worship idols. So right there, I'm saying to myself, "Catholics are going to go to hell, but my aunt Molly married a Catholic and she converted and she's got 11 kids and they're all pretty nice and one of them's my good friend – they're all going to go to hell?" I'm thinking to myself, "This is bullshite." And if that's bullshite, how much of the rest of it is bullshite?

quote:
Did you write on coke?
Oh, yeah, I had to. I mean, coke was different from booze. Booze, I could wait, and I didn't drink or anything. But I used coke all the time.

I'm trying to comprehend how you lived this whole secret life of a drug addict for eight years, all the while churning out bestsellers and being a family man.
Well, I can't comprehend it now, either, but you do what you have to do. And when you're an addict, you have to use. So you just try to balance things out as best you can. But little by little, the family life started to show cracks.

I was usually pretty good about it. I was able to get up and make the kids breakfast and get them off to school. And I was strong; I had a lot of energy. I would've killed myself otherwise. But the books start to show it after a while. Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes IS cocaine. She was my number-one fan.

quote:
Did the quality of your writing start to go down?
Yeah, it did. I mean, The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there."

Is The Tommyknockers the one book in your catalog you think you botched?
Well, I don't like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. [In 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and left severely injured.] I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn't work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that's another book that shows the drugs at work.

Full interview.