Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

"The reason all of this is so horrible," McVries said, "is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren't mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope."

Stephen King
The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face... and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?

Stephen King
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?

Stephen King
We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.

Stephen King
This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six! … Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four! … Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!

Stephen King
"You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

Stephen King
I was being paid to do what I loved, and there's no gig on earth better than that; it's like a license to steal.

Stephen King
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

Stephen King
You could not turn off love- even the rather absent, sometimes taken for granted love- the way you'd turn off a faucet. Love ran from the heart and the heart had it's own imperatives

Stephen King
The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
Don't let your elders and supposed betters tell you any different. Sure, you've never been to Paris. No, you never ran with the bulls at Pamploma. Yes, you're a pissant who had no hair in your armpits until three years ago - but so what? If you don't start out too big for your britches, how are you gonna fill 'em when you grow up? Let it rip regardless of what anybody tells you, that's my idea; sit down an smoke that baby.

Stephen King
The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.

Stephen King
The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood...

Stephen King
The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

Stephen King
I'd been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness...

Stephen King
Hug and kiss whoever helped get you - financially, mentally, morally, emotionally - to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.

Stephen King
It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

Stephen King
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.

Stephen King
People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You've heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What's so sweet about that?

Stephen King
And almost idly, in a kind of sidethought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

Stephen King
Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. what else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing.

Stephen King
I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids... Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.

Stephen King
Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.

Stephen King
They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

Stephen King
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.

Stephen King
And didn't they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?

Stephen King
Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.

Stephen King