Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution.

Stephen King
Once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual.

Stephen King
He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

Stephen King
Overhead, capricious spring clouds began to scud across the sky in mackerel shapes, promising more rain. Garraty turned up his collar and listened to the sound of his feet pounding the pavement. There was a trick to that, a subtle mental adjustment, like having better night vision the longer you were in the dark. This morning the sound of his feet had been lost to him. They had been lost in the tramp of ninety-nine other pairs, not to mention the rumble of the halftrack. But now he heard them easily. His own particular stride, and the way his left foot scraped the pavement every now and then. It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.

Stephen King
A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.

Stephen King
Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?

Stephen King
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Stephen King
A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

Stephen King
She felt like someone who drowns remembering what it was like to still be on the boat, so calm and at ease, so carelessly safe

Stephen King
If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

Stephen King
And then a funny thing happened to me... except when I think about it, it wasn't very funny at all. There must be a line in all of us, a very clear one, just like the line that divides the light side of a planet from the dark. I think they call that line the terminator. That's a very good word for it. Because at that moment I was freaking out, and at the next I was as cool as a cucumber.

Stephen King
The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

Stephen King
In a book, all would have gone according to plan.... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of your most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?

Stephen King
You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.

Stephen King
If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it's so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.

Stephen King
Talent is never static. It's always growing or dying.

Stephen King
Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

Stephen King
I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.

Stephen King
Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

Stephen King
America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time.

Stephen King
As for the end of the universe…I say let it come as it will, in ice, fire, or darkness. What did the universe ever do for me that I should mind its welfare?

Stephen King
He looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Stephen King
"I hold to no God," Roland said. "I hold to the Tower, and won't pray to that."

Stephen King
Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

Stephen King
There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy——anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.

Stephen King
Hurt's a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don't change facts.

Stephen King
Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position.

Stephen King
You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.

Stephen King
This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination.

Stephen King
I've put men to death-men with supposedly immortal souls-that looked dumber than that mouse

Stephen King