Stephen King Quotes

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Go then, there are other worlds than these.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.

That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.

Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Nobody likes a clown at midnight

I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.

Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

Time's the thief of memory

We all float down here!

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

Sometimes dead is better

High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up.

Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows

It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

Friends. They aren’t any such thing as good friend or bad friend. Maybe there are just friend. People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely. Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for. Maybe worth dying for too. If that what has to be. No bad friends. Only people you want. Need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Hug and kiss whoever helped get you - financially, mentally, morally, emotionally - to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..

There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.

I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.