Stephen King might be a prolific and entertaining tweeter—we’ve written about his tweets before—but it turns out the horror master isn’t a fan of the platform. And by that, we mean Stephen King freaking hates Twitter.
This week King received the PEN Literary Service Award at the 2018 PEN Literary Awards. The Literary Service Award is rewarded each year to an author and advocate of free speech. In King’s eyes, Twitter is not a place where the honor of his award is represented.
According to Mashable, King believes that “the intellectual dead zone known as Twitter where clear thinking and kindness is too often replaced by schoolyard taunts. And not to mention, bad spelling and bad grammar.”
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King also went on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show and revealed that the man they call the President of the United States has blocked him on Twitter. So King blocked him back. King joked that he blocked Trump from watching It last year, but he for real blocked Vice President Mike Pence because he looks so “creepy.”
“The last time I was here, I had a president who had just given me a National Medal of the Arts,” Stephen King said when he sat down on The Late Show couch Wednesday night. “Now we’ve got a president who blocked me on Twitter.”
During his PEN acceptance speech, King thanked his editors at Simon & Schuster, as well as the school shooting survivors and student activists from Parkland, Florida. But King wasn’t done with his Twitter roasting.
“The percentage of readers is relatively small compared to the population as a whole,” he said. “Just think for a minute of all the people you see on these streets every day staring at their phones or with earbuds in their ears. Then think of how few of them are staring at a printed page instead.”
King also went on to defend the majesty and power of books.
“Reading is powerful. From my earliest days working as a high school teacher, I’ve been telling kids: those who can read can learn to write, and those who can do both will eventually succeed in the world,” King said. “Readers learn to be fair and writers learn to think…They are the crucial counter weight to those who are close minded and mean spirited. Too many of those are currently in positions of power.”
Those people, King added, reside on Twitter, which is the best place for them to dish out their “poverty of thought.”
