Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen King
'Any big hotels have got scandals,' he said. 'Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go.'

Stephen King
It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)

Stephen King
C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

Stephen King
There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.

Stephen King
Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon making them look as if they had fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs.

Stephen King
Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth. As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon.

Stephen King
"Your name is John Coffey."
"Yes, sir, boss, like the drink only not spelled the same way."

Stephen King
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

Stephen King
You'd be surprised what a person can live with, Dan said.

Stephen King
The year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy.

Stephen King
Terror…often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

Stephen King
What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

Stephen King
The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling — a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing.

Stephen King
If life teaches anything at all it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes that there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

Stephen King
She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.

Stephen King
What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

Stephen King
What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...

Stephen King
Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

Stephen King
For," I said, "a murdered man or woman dies not in God's time, but in Man's. He... or she... is cut short before he... or she... can atone for sin, and so all errors must be forgiven. When you think of it that way, all murderers are a gateway for heaven.

Stephen King
You will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God's help you will stand.

Stephen King
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

Stephen King