Stephen King: 10 quotes on his birthday

Stephen King, America's master-writer of horror, suspense, and thriller novels, was born in Portland, Me., on Sept. 21, 1947. When he was two years old his father went out to get cigarettes and never returned, leaving his mother to raise him and his older brother alone. King began writing his own stories by the age of seven. He published his first story – "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber" – in serial form at the age of 18. King graduated from the University of Maine in 1970 with a B.A. in English and a teaching certificate.  While teaching and working several odd jobs, King continued to write short stories for several magazines and eventually got his first novel, "Carrie," published by Doubleday & Co in 1973. The novel’s success allowed King to quit his other jobs in order to write full time. To date he has published over 150 works including short stories and novels. Some of his best known works include "Salem’s Lot" (1975), "The Stand" (1978), "Misery" (1987), "Pet Sematary" (1993), and "The Dark Tower" novels (1982-2004).

1. Fiction

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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