Stephen King Quotes

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -

Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.

There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

A short story is like a kiss in the dark.

There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.

It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.

I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was." "Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly. "It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town.

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

Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.

Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.

Semi-automatic s have only two purposes. One is so owners can take them to the shooting range once in a while, yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use-their only other use-is to kill people.

Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?

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.

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.

No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person

All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don't even think about money.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

It's not the pain I'm afraid of; I know about the pain. What I'm afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream.

There are a lot of people in the field [ of horror stories] that I do read. There is a lot of stuff that is written in this field, though, that is not very good. You just have to look for the good stuff.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.

One can often trace the sources of a brand personality - here it is the advertising, there the pack, somewhere else some physical element of the product. Of course, the personality is clearest and strongest when all the elements are consistent.

So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.

In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.

You know how it's going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination. It's like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.

When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.

There is the Watchmaker Theory that God wound up the universe and let it tick. That may be. or it may be that he takes a hand in things from time to time. But whatever it is, I am sure that there is something out there.

You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

Carrie was a terrific piece of work. At the end of the movie comes, when Amy Irving kneels down to put the flowers on Carrie's grave, a hand comes up through the grave and seizes her by the arm. The audience went to the roof, totally to the roof. It was just the most amazing reaction. And I thought, 'We have a monster hit on our hands. Brian De Palma has done something new. He's actually created a shock ending that shocks an audience that was ready for a horror film.' And there were several people who did it after that.