Stephen King On Learning To Write From Reading

     If you want to be a writer you must read a lot. There's no way around this that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

     I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It's what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don't read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Stephen King, On Writing, 2000