Stephen King Quotes

671 Sourced Quotes

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Stephen King
All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

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
They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

Stephen King
If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

Stephen King
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.

Stephen King
If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?

Stephen King
I believe that anyone using the phrase 'That's so cool' should have to stand in the corner.

Stephen King
He pointed toward the silhouettes on the side of the [bathrooms] instead—black cutout man, black cutout woman. The man had his legs apart, the woman had hers together. Pretty much the story of the human race in sign language.

Stephen King
A cat won't curry favor even if it's in their best interests to do so. A cat can't be a hypocrite. If more preachers were like cats, this would be a more religious country.

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

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

Stephen King
Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.

Stephen King
The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.

Stephen King
Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.

Stephen King
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

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
Starkey put his fingers under the man's chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man's eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said, ANY QUESTIONS?

Stephen King
Outside, a gusty October breeze was combing leaves from the trees and sending them across her backyard in colorful skitters.

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

Stephen King
Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past... That's what ghosts are.

Stephen King
In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives....

Stephen King
I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

Stephen King
Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.

Stephen King
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Stephen King