Horror Humor: Author Stephen King may be...

Horror Humor: Author Stephen King may be a master of the macabre but he’s also not bad at one-liners. “People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff,” he told 2,300 fans in Portland, Me., Tuesday night. “I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy, and I keep it in a jar on my desk.” He said some people pay psychiatrists to help them reveal “their most twisted fantasies. I, on the other hand, write them down, and they pay me. It’s a great way to live.”

Unexpected Support: Ann Richards got an unusual endorsement for her Democratic gubernatorial campaign. “If I were forced to, I’d choose Ann Richards,” Robert West, editor of Endeavor, a newspaper produced by men on Death Row, said Wednesday in Huntsville, Tex. “I think she recognizes people can change because she’s a recovering alcoholic.” James Beathard, an assistant editor, said the Texas treasurer came down on the right side on schools, racial discrimination, women’s rights and the budget. But Richards, campaigning in San Antonio Tuesday, said of the endorsement: “I don’t know what possibly could have engendered it.” Her view of capital punishment? “The death penalty is . . . the law and the law should be carried out.”

Words for Sale: A large part of Jean-Paul Sartre’s manuscript on classical French novelist Gustave Flaubert will be auctioned Monday in Paris with an estimated price of $30,000. The document, “The Idiot of the Family,” represents 95% of the work as published in 1972. Also up for auction are other manuscripts by the late philosopher on such subjects as racism, prisons and Palestine.

McAuliffe Planetarium: New Hampshire Gov. Judd Gregg is hoping to draw President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Concord for the opening of a planetarium honoring Christa McAuliffe, the Concord High teacher and astronaut killed in the Challenger explosion in 1986. The planetarium formally opens in April.