Stephen King Quotes

Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn't it? Shadows grow faces.
Stephen King
What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.
Stephen King
Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
Stephen King
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Stephen King
Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can't afford.
Stephen King
I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami but salami is salami.
Stephen King
Also, I'm angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?
Stephen King
...some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt
Stephen King
Never give a good politician time to pray.
Stephen King
I am not the potter, not the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master's skill?
Stephen King
In the end, we wear out our worries.
Stephen King
If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.
Stephen King
Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.
Stephen King
When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.
Stephen King
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we're stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It's not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
Stephen King
I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you.
Stephen King
When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.
Stephen King
A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects.
Stephen King
[Prison Break is] one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today.
Stephen King
The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.
Stephen King
The wide corridor up the centre of E Block was floored with linoleum the colour of tired old limes, and so what was the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.
Stephen King
Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.
Stephen King
In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom.
Stephen King
There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.
Stephen King
And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.
Stephen King
Faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.
Stephen King
Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.
Stephen King
College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.
Stephen King
A man who lies about beer makes enemies
Stephen King
History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.
Stephen King
Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?"He stared at me, baffled. "Why the fuck would you do that?
Stephen King
Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm.“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man …She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. “Who are you, George?”“Someone you knew in another life, honey.
Stephen King
The past is obdurate.
Stephen King
Can the future hsitory of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and live unremarkable lives?
Stephen King
Not today. Instead of Wendy, I found myself thinking of Annie Ross and realizing I’d developed a small but powerful crush on her. The fact that nothing could come of it—she had to be ten years older than me, maybe twelve—only seemed to make things worse. Or maybe I mean better, because unrequited love does have its attractions for young men.
Stephen King
Tony, Tony,come around, something's lost that can't be found.
Stephen King
But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
Stephen King
The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.
Stephen King
She gave him a strange maternal grin.For the first time, clearly, the thought surfaced in Paul Sheldon’s mind: I am introuble here. This woman is not right.
Stephen King
We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.
Stephen King
You're like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn't last an hour in a slaughterhouse.
Stephen King
Misery suffered did not justify misery to come.
Stephen King
When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin.
Stephen King
It was never for you, Annie, or all the other people out there who sign their letters “Your number-one fan.” The minute you start to write all those people are at the other end of the galaxy, or something. It was never for my ex-wives, or my mother, or for my father. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.
Stephen King
Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.
Stephen King
I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.
Stephen King
We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it's early Beatles- John Lennon, actually- singing 'I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.
Stephen King
Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.
Stephen King
All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake.
Stephen King
The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.
Stephen King
I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?
Stephen King
It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, "Here you are. Try not to lose it." But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.
Stephen King
Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?
Stephen King
A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway.
Stephen King
Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.
Stephen King
I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense.
Stephen King
Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.
Stephen King
She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. 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
To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.
Stephen King
Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone.
Stephen King