Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels.
Here is a collection of Stephen King most famous quotes: Stephen King Quotes about love, life, time, success, hope, optimism, friendship, children, freedom and friends. best quotes from Stephen King books. Quotes and Sayings on writing, reading, books, magic, bravery, change, positive-thinking, stories, comedy, creativity, humor, dark and horror by Stephen King.
Stephen King Quotes and Sayings
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
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.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.
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.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
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.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.
It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.
You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
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.
We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.
A short story is a different thing altogether - a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
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.
Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy.... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
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.
And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.
You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.
Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.
Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.
I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.
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.
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.
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.
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
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.
He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Your hair is winter fire, january embers. My heart burns there, too.
But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
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.
Fear stands for fuck everything and run.
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."
Nobody likes a clown at midnight.
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
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.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
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.
And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.
Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
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.
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.
We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.
It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
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.
Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.
Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.
Sometimes dead is better.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
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.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.
"She can't help it," he said. "She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog."
Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.
Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.
Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.
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.
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
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.
I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.
No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.
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.
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.
After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.
Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
Time's the thief of memory.
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.
We're news junkies in my house.
We all float down here!
The only mortal sin is giving up.
Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.
What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.
Do you drink? "Of course, I just said I was a writer."
A coward judges all he sees by what he is.
A person can't change all at once.
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.
Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.
I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.
Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
Come on back and we'll see if you remember the simplest thing of all - how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.
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.
I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.
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.
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
It's hard to let go. Even when what you're holding onto is full of thorns, it's hard to let go. Maybe especially then.
We're here to fuck shit up.
If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.
Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.
I tend to scare myself.
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
Do it for joy and you can do it forever.
If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.
As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.
A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.
Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.
I write to find out what I think.
If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say "I can do this" even when you know you can't.
I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.
And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
Some things were better lost than found.
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
And people who don't dream, who don't have any kind of imaginative life, they must.... they must go nuts. I can't imagine that.
First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire. - Roland Deschain, of Gilead.
What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.
What can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.
Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.
But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don't think it's in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?
If you don't control your temper, your temper will control you.
Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.
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.
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn't a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
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?
If you can't laugh when things go bad―laugh and put on a little carnival―then you're either dead or wishing you were.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.
love is what moves the world, I've always thought.... it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down.... bring them low.... and make them crawl...
Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?
I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.
Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.
Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.
The soil of a man's heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.
I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
The man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.
Love isn't soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.
We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
The most important things are the hardest to say.
You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.
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.
Home is where they want you to stay longer.
I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.
I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!
I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why dos it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.
It was like drowning, only from the inside out.
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.
The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.
Great events turn on small hinges.
Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.
Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear.
I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
I am your number one fan.
When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.
If you don't have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?
Long days and pleasant nights.
Weird love's better than no love at all.
It's a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.
May be she'll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.
The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can, and he tends it. 'Cause what you buy, is what you own. And what you own.... always comes home to you.
Words have weight.
And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.
He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
The turtle couldn't help us.
If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.
But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
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.
The mystery of the universe is not time but size.
You can't be careful on a skateboard.
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
The good thing about being old, is you don't have to worry about dying young.
The past is obdurate.
They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
Just go on dancing with me like this forever and I'll never tire. We'll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.
If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.
Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.
There is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.
I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.
We never cease wanting what we want, whether it's good for us or not.
The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.
Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.
Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake - eyes. Its just how the world is.
Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.
True sorrow is as rare as true love.
If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.
Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.
Politics always change. Stories never do.
Time heals all wounds.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
Everyone loves something for nothing.... even if it costs everything.
I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.
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 each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
People say that where there's life, there's hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse. There is hope, therefore I live.
In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives.
We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.
She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.
She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.
Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.
Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.
Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story.
He was a romantic in his own harsh way.... yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.
A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club.
Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.
Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.