Stephen King Quotes

Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Stories are like relics, part of an undiscovered preexisting world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.

I just didn't want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (what ever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

And that almost killed you?" "It wasn't deep but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

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

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.

Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.

I think we fought Vietnam for the benefits of civilization, and certainly we fought it to oppose authority. To show our authority, to show we weren't weak. Isn't that what Nixon kept saying? "We have to show the world that we're not weak." So of course what we ended up showing the world was that we were, yep, weak. 'Cause we couldn't beat these kids in black pajamas.

I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

As a species we're fundamentally insane.

Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Go then, there are other worlds than these.

A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.

The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.

Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer.

With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen--if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.

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.

Death was no less a miracle than birth.

It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

That was what I wanted, but I don't need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

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

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Overhead was a sky blacker than jewlers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down.

If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.

Explanations are such cheap poetry.

I always felt that organized religion was just basically a theological insurance scam where they're saying if you spend time with us, guess what, you're going to live forever, you're going to go to some other plain where you're going to be so happy, you'll just be happy all the time, which is also kind of a scary idea to me.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Jesus watches from the wall, But his face is cold as stone, And if he loves me As she tells me Why do I feel so all alone?

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.