Quotes by Stephen King
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No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person.

Maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses to liven things up, who knows?

Teddy, Vern, Chris: I don't shut up. I grow up. And when I look at you, I throw up. Aghhh! Gordie: And then your mom goes around the corner and she licks it up.

The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.

When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.

When you ask me what I'm afraid of, I'd say I still go to see ghost movies when I get a chance or some sort of supernatural being, but it doesn't scare me as it scared me when I was a child.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

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.

Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing.

On a couple of occasions I've shocked myself. Pet Sematery was appalling when it first came out on to the page.

I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on.

Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark.

He was a romantic in his own harsh way…yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.

You can't polish a turd.

Stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.

It's the unanswered questions that makes it worth getting up in the morning.

There's a saying -- Write what you know. It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.

Waiting rooms were made for books-of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone's favorite, the john.

Sometimes dead is better.

Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.

The redness was going out of the light now, the remains of the day were a fading pink, the color of wild roses.

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

Because things like this you can only ssay once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again.

If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Writing's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

I want to make you laugh or cry when you read a story ...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Small towns harbor small imaginations.

I work to loud music -- hard-rock stuff like AC DC, Guns 'n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites -- but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door.

Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.

Sure, we need the gypsies. we always have. because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there?

It was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved.

The person healed has an obligation to then ask why-- to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will.

Sour cream! He had tasted it once and liked to puke.

If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross out. I'm not proud.

How many times, over how many years, had he--a grown man--asked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud.

As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along.

They are surprised that he did it, though, which shows you that the male mind expects very little in the way of altruism from it's fellows.

Later, going home, I realized they didn't look alike at all; what made them seem to was the aftermath of stress and the lingering of sorrow. It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.

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.

I have the world's best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.

I just didn't want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.

And then woe is you, Pauly. Woe to the max.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.

There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.

Why does everyone think that I am a cruel and insensitive man? I mean, come on, I have kids... on my desk in little jars!

Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.

Overhead was a sky blacker than jewlers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down.

The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.

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.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

He looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.

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

It seems to occur to few of the attendees of a writing retreat that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.

Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.

Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.

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.

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

I start work around 8 a.m. and usually finish around noon. If there's more to do, I do it in the late afternoon, although that isn't prime time for me.

Before it occurred to me that I might actually need an agent, I had generated well over three million dollars' worth of income, a good deal of it for the publisher.

Case closed, game over, zip up your fly.

It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate -- they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

It's ironic to think that behaviors we consider neurotic are actually holding the word in place -- but sooner or later whatever protection they offer decays.And it's so much work.So damn much work.

The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it.

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

What really bugs Henry about Barry, he supposes, is Barry's complacency. His inner assurance that there is no need to change his self-destructive behavior, let alone search for its roots.

She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours.

Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that -- while not perfect -- is pretty spooky.

Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.

I denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger and the White and never once questioned the choice.

Actually, I think living's the worst habit.

A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.

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.

Free, free, free... necromancer, I love you.

Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.

There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there's a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands.

It's a tough life if you don't weaken.

I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don't want more things. If I want other stuff -- movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album -- I have my Mac.

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