Stephen King Quotes - Page 12

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.
Stephen King
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Stephen King
Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard
Stephen King
I know how bad you boys feel, but the sun will still come up tomorrow. And when it does, you 'll feel better. When the sun comes up the day after tomorrow, a little better still. This is just a part of your life, and it's over. It would have been better to win, but either way, it's over. Life will go on.
Stephen King
About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.
Stephen King
Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?
Stephen King
He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.
Stephen King
She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
Stephen King
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
Stephen King
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
Stephen King
Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.
Stephen King
Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.
Stephen King
I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.
Stephen King
Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
Stephen King
Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.
Stephen King
I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?
Stephen King
It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.
Stephen King
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...
Stephen King
There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
Stephen King
What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.
Stephen King
...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
Stephen King
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
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
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
Stephen King
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
remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.
Stephen King
For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to 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.
Stephen King
It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Stephen King
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
Stephen King
As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.
Stephen King
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
Stephen King
Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you're not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] ... It's unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, "I'm sorry, good buddy, you've written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner"?The idea has some validity, but I don't think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I'm looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than "This sucks." (Although most of us know that "I think this has a few problems" actually means "This sucks," don't we?)
Stephen King
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.
Stephen King
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.
Stephen King
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.
Stephen King
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.
Stephen King
I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.
Stephen King
He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.
Stephen King
The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.
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 writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.", May/June 2009)]
Stephen King
No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen King
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.
Stephen King
‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Stephen King
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
Stephen King
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
Stephen King
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
Stephen King
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.
Stephen King
Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?
Stephen King
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Stephen King
I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
Stephen King
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
Stephen King