I have been reading him. Not his books because I simply can`t read horror, I get upset, it sticks in my head and I can`t un-know it. He is damn good at it though. No, it is the very revealing interview with King in The Paris Review Interviews vol 2 - a series all aspiring writers should have on their shelves. You learn something and become a better writer from every single interview. King says so many things that make sense - common sense, literary sense, all sorts of sense.  He is very good on the people who come up and tell you they wish you`d write more books like the one you wrote 30 years ago. 'There are people out there who would have been perfectly happy had I died in 1978.' (with me it is 1971.) 'You try to grow as a writer and not just do the same thing over and over again.'

King was mighty unpopular in some literary-snobbish quarters when he was awarded the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He gave a speech defending popular fiction and got yet more flak from the litsnobs. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories but there is truth in what he says about the literary establishment - and in this country that means the ACADEMIC literary establishment rather than  just other writers -trying to retain superiority and exclusivity by stipulating what is and what is not good literature, or literary fiction. 'The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a shortlist of authors who are going to be allowed inside and too often that list is drawn from people who know people .. who come up through certain channels of literature. And that`s a bad idea. It`s constraining for the growth of literature.'

He then makes an extremely pertinent point - and it is pertinent not just to writers but to critics. King says, 'It all goes back to this idea, held by a lot of people who analyze literature for a living, who say, if we let the rabble in then they`ll see that anybody can do this, that it is accessible to anyone.'  Indeed indeed. I like the idea, as a book blogger as well as a writer, of being one of the rabble.

One more thing he says that still makes sense to me, even though we have just had a lot of people at the London Book Fair trying like mad to prove us wrong - people who should know better. King mentions e-books - and therefore, e-readers, and there is a huge pressure on us all at the moment to subscribe the idea that e-readers are about to make the book obsolete.  He calls them 'these little gadgets that let you read  a book in your hand, where you push a button to turn a page.'  And then he says simply, 'I never liked the idea and most people don`t.  They want to have pages.'  Let me put that more emphatically and hope some of them out there are listening. THEY WANT TO HAVE PAGES.

e-readers will have their place and I am not a luddite. I love my laptop. But I also love my notebook and pen. The e-reader is not the same as, say, the i-pod. No one was in love with gramophone records, 78 rpm, and then with CDs. It was the music they played that was the entire point. There is nothing physically delightful about a CD and they are a pain to store. But there IS something physically delightful about a book - and indeed often physically beautiful. I even find something delightful about a newspaper. This morning it was foggy and the SP suggested I didn`t need to go out as I could get my daily fix of my daily paper online. Indeed. But you see, I like a newspaper, just as I like a book. I will skim the latest headlines on my laptop but for a proper read, I want a paper. And for the other sort of proper read, I want pages. I want a book. As Stephen King says. Good man, Stephen King.