Quotes by Stephen King
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Sons figured out they were bigger and never forgot it. Sons didn't care about the world they left for their sons or for their daughters, although they said they did when the time came to run for office.

And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing let's pretend.

The Dark Powers have to give before they can take.

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

You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.

Suicide gets in the air sometimes. Like a cold germ.

Strong delusions travel like
cold germs on a sneeze.

The boy who became a man progressed from darkness and unlearning to light and responsibility.

Misery suffered did not justify misery to come.

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

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.

The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain -- although it may think it can -- the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.

Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.

There are a lot of people in the field of horror stories that I do read. There is a lot of stuff that is written in this field, though, that is not very good. You just have to look for the good stuff.

I've put men to death-men with supposedly immortal souls-that looked dumber than that mouse.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

What we've got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don't think it's in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.

But time changed. That was something only drunks and junkies understood. When you
couldn't sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth.

Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do -- the wind that blows through the keyhole -- is the breath of all the living universe.

This is dying -- I know because I've done it before.

No! Oy agreed. Zero surprise there; if Ake said it, you could take it to the bumbler bank, as far as Oy was concerned.

You say true, I say thankya.

I don't like people. They fuck me up.

Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet. You came! Jake shouted. You really came! I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came.

Zitner said hell would freeze over before something like that happened. Harold had a brief image of Adolf Hitler and Judas Iscariot handing out ice-skates and went on heaving sandbags.

For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House of the Prairie shit.

I'm so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta, only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no other.

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

A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

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

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

And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.

Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me.

You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy.

I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out -- just forget it.

The poets continually and sometimes wilfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better -- and maybe not all that much better after all.

They say that loving eyes can never see, but that's a fool's axiom. Sometimes, they see too much.

When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.

I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!

The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.

Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

The only mortal sin is giving up.

I think most of us are fascinated by the macabre and by the weird and even the nastiness that comes along.

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

'Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.
'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.
'And desire,' Beverly said.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal Once upon a time.

Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.

Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.

What a paragon of virtue you are, gunslinger! the man in black laughed.

The sun was a molten coin burning a circle in the low-hanging overcast, surrounded by a fairy-ring of moisture.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

I remember that I wanted to kill It,' Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice.

Plums deify.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought.

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished bannister which suddenly and without warning turns into a razorblade. Man, I was days getting over that.

There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.

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.

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate -- four to six hours a day, every day -- will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.

It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

And he thought that, had he been wearing his guns, he might well have drawn one and put a bullet in Susan Delgado's cold and whoring little heart.

Roland cannot grasp that unhappiness and shame are often no match for desire.

Not all are called to the way of the sword or the gun or the ship, but all serve ka.

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world.

I'm afraid to go to sleep. I'm afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me.

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.

And so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.

A person's never too old for stories. Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. -- Roland Deschain.

There will be water if God wills it.

You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.

I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

I can bear to tell you no more-- only that they comforted each other as
well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter
experience, that is never quite good enough.

For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!

Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Outside, the engine-sound of the Desperation police-cruiser grew fatter and closer. A little farther off, the coyotes howled. To David that howling had begun to sound like the laughter of lunatics after the keepers have decamped the asylum.

Red flashes of light leaped in front of her eyes like ballet dancers.

You fucking drunken waste god wiped snot out of his nose and that was you.

His words faded, because here were the switches Dan was looking for. The special switches, the ones with the red handles ...
Shine on, he thought, and pulled them all.

Nobody lives forever, but we all shine on.

Hearts are tough, Most times they don't break. Most times they are only bend.

And he had begun to feel then what he was feeling now: the complex and awful mental and physical interaction that is the beginning of acceptance, and the only counterpart to that feeling is rape.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.