Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that.

Stephen King
How many times, over how many years, had he—a grown man—asked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud.

Stephen King
I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!

Stephen King
I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses.

Stephen King
Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

Stephen King
And the rain went rollin down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n' squiggled on her check and forehead like black veins.

Stephen King
Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.

Stephen King
We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.

Stephen King
Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

Stephen King
The rest of it — and perhaps the best of it — is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. 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.

Stephen King
Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

Stephen King
Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!

Stephen King
As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

Stephen King
When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.

Stephen King