Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.

Stephen King
There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

Stephen King
The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

Stephen King
Knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

Stephen King
Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

Stephen King
But it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.

Stephen King
I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

Stephen King
A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

Stephen King
Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abbandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it.

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
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
It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.

Stephen King
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.

Stephen King
The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

Stephen King
Parenting is the greatest of hum-a-few-bars-and-I'll-fake-it skills.

Stephen King
It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

Stephen King
"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."

Stephen King
I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

Stephen King
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Stephen King
A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.

Stephen King
And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.

Stephen King
Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.

Stephen King
But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

Stephen King
There's nothing as human as hunger. There's no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

Stephen King
Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.

Stephen King
The simple truth of things is that bad dreams are far better than bad wakings.

Stephen King
Mornings belong to whatever is new; the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters.

Stephen King
By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

Stephen King
Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God I hope not.

Stephen King
Forced to define 'irrational subconscious,' I would say that it is a small padded room inside all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets.

Stephen King