Q & A with Stephen King

Stephen King likes to start the conversation and so the horror author began asking questions before TIME's Gilbert Cruz could take a seat to interview him in New York City. But Cruz soon took over. Excerpts:

STEPHEN KING: So who's going to be TIME Person of the Year?

TIME: I really don't know, there's a very small group of people who make that decision.

SK: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

TIME: Really?

SK: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

(Continued here.)