Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen King
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
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

Stephen King
I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a dawn thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for a while in the morning's clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.
Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

Stephen King
My friend wants to get moving and so do I,' Eddie said. 'We've got miles to go yet.' I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar.' Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed.

Stephen King
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Stephen King
It's hard to let go. Even when what you're holding onto is full of thorns, it's hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

Stephen King
Clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

Stephen King
Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

Stephen King
That was what I wanted, but I don't need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.

Stephen King
What can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.

Stephen King
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride—if responsibility robs him of his manhood.

Stephen King
Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward life with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

Stephen King