King isn't simply saying that adverbs make writing lazy—he's identifying how they become a writer's escape hatch from doing the harder work of selecting precise verbs and nouns. When you write "he walked quickly" instead of "he rushed," you've outsourced your thinking to a modifier rather than finding the one true word. The same principle haunts our daily speech: we say someone is "really smart" instead of naming what we mean—innovative, or methodical, or original—and in that vagueness, we've stopped actually knowing what we admire. The real damnation isn't the adverbs themselves but the mental softness they permit.