Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

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

Stephen King
On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.

Stephen King
"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
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

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
As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

Stephen King
City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

Stephen King
You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

Stephen King
Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.

Stephen King
Most of them are plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonalds.

Stephen King
It's a poorboy sanditch,' Roland said. 'With lots of mayo, whatever that is. I'd want a sauce that didn't look quite so much like come, myself, but may it do ya fine.

Stephen King
"This," I said pleasantly, "is known as getting it on."

Stephen King
When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.

Stephen King
He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever.

Stephen King
No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.

Stephen King
Has it ever occurred to you... that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?

Stephen King
We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.

Stephen King
What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.

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

Stephen King
You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It's only kids in high school who are convinced they're never going to change. There's always going to be a pep rally and there's always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.

Stephen King
Mr. Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels; he makes what the rest of us do look like cheap watchmakers in drugstores.

Stephen King
I started to submit when I was twelve, and obviously at that time they weren't good enough, and I suppose in my heart of hearts I knew it. But you have to start sooner or later, you have to dig in.

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
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Stephen King
When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.

Stephen King