Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Stephen King
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.

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

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

Stephen King
If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.

Stephen King
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..

Stephen King
It didn't occur to me until later that there's another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.

Stephen King
Sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

Stephen King
I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.

Stephen King
For me, it always wants to be sex and always falls short — it's always that adolescent handjob in the bathroom with the door locked.

Stephen King
Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.

Stephen King
Don't live in this place. If you're a grad student or if you have a few more courses to pick up, fine. But if you're still hanging out in Orono or Old Town three years from now, living like an undergraduate in some sleazy apartment or trailer park, there's something wrong with you. This is not Never-Neverland. Peter Pan graduated back in '73 and now has a nice little farm in Bethel. You are not the Lost Boys and Lost Girls, but if you stay here too long, you will grow the equivalent of donkey ears. For most of you, it's time to move on. If you didn't have a better time here than you did in high school, you're weird. If you want to stay here and keep being an undergraduate, you're very weird.

Stephen King
And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.

Stephen King
Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet. You came! Jake shouted. You really came! I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came.

Stephen King
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

Stephen King
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

Stephen King
I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.

Stephen King
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

Stephen King
I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.

Stephen King
Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

Stephen King
There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them... and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Stephen King
Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear.

Stephen King
And suddenly it didn't seem to matter any more, nothing would matter if she could turn over, turn over and see the stars, turn over and look once and die.

Stephen King
Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.

Stephen King
The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.

Stephen King