Stephen King Quotes

Tell him he's wrong. Tell him that even if he's right about waiting, he's right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway... You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I'm afraid, that Geraldo, Keith Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

Research can only present data about the past. No one seriously believes that people's answers to hypothetical questions about the future accurately represent their future behaviour; they merely represent a current attitude, which may or may not be translated into future behaviour.

And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend

Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.

Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.

Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome.

A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it.

It's a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

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.

Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.

On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?

To the devil with false modesty.

A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.

I am religious in the sense that I believe in God and I believe that there is an abiding logical spirit that controls what goes on to a certain extent.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. "I think this is it.

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

But it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.

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

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

The world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever.

What really scares me is Alzheimer's or premature senility, losing that ability to read and enjoy and to write. And you do it, and some days maybe aren't so good, and then some days, you really catch a wave, and it's as good as it ever was.

Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon making them look as if they had fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs.

By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

Busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

This is a dreadful thing to say, but I have wondered in my darker hours that, if everything were legal, wouldn't it be kind of a Darwinian solution to a lot of problems? Who are the bikies that you see who are cruisin' around with no helmet or with a hat turned around like that yoyo in Cheap Trick? They're dummies, and if they splatter their brains all over the sidewalk, they're not going to be collecting food stamps.

Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, "Write.

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

The only leverage the manufacturer can apply to the retailer is his relationship with the consumer. And the main element in profit growth is going to have to lie in making his brand more valuable to the retailer, through its being more valuable to the consumer. And that means his brand must be unique, it must have no adequate direct substitutes - because it is in this, after all, that value lies.

The dream didn't fade as dreams usually do upon waking.

But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.

A person’s never too old for stories. Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. - Roland Deschain

Long days and pleasant nights

I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter - eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low - pressure time - that's one of the things I love about it).

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

We live in a society now where the sexual taboo for children has really passed by the wayside. Any nineyear-old can go into a 7-11 and check out the Playmate of the Month, but you don't want your kids to know about death. You don't want your kids to know about disfigurement. You don't want 'em to know about creepy things because it might warp their little minds.

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."

What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.

As far as where I go when I die, the concept that I am simple going to flick out, like a light bulb, to me is not only spiritually impossible to believe, but logically it is laughable - the idea that we simply die and nothing happens.