Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball.

Stephen King
Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

Stephen King
There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.

Stephen King
You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn't question knowing.

Stephen King
He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot.

Stephen King
I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

Stephen King
For no reason at all, I thought of New Year's Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days in this best of all possible worlds. I have always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic overslop of the crowd's lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular.

Stephen King
Time continued to pass - the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic.

Stephen King
Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Stephen King
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Stephen King
Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.

Stephen King
The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

Stephen King
It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

Stephen King
Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.

Stephen King
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".

Stephen King
Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

Stephen King
Kindle, isn't it? the waitress asked. I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I'm reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult's books. Oh, probably not all of them, Wesley said. Huh? Why not? She's probably got another one done already. That's all I meant. And James Patterson's probably written one since he got up this morning! she said, and went off chortling.

Stephen King
Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?

Stephen King
On the subject of love at first sight, I'm with the Beatles: I believe that it happens all the time.

Stephen King
'Any big hotels have got scandals,' he said. 'Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go.'

Stephen King
If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone

Stephen King
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair... Come to it any way but lightly.

Stephen King
She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.

Stephen King
He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge.

Stephen King
The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture.

Stephen King
Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.

Stephen King
Daylight came creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.

Stephen King
This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up.
Why would she not?
After all, it had sort of been her idea.

Stephen King
He felt as if Stillson might have taken the game of the Laughing Tiger a step further: inside the beast-skin, a man, yes. But inside the man-skin, a beast.

Stephen King
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying... but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.

Stephen King