Stephen King Quotes - Page 2

There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Stephen King
Well, luck is for fools. It's all they have to hope for, poor devils.
Stephen King
One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.
Stephen King
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
Stephen King
The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.
Stephen King
I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!
Stephen King
She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.
Stephen King
The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.
Stephen King
The sky of the color of ashes in the east and embers in the west.
Stephen King
He knew a great deal of the Bible already, and he knew the Bible believed in all sorts of weird stuff. According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost, and that was just the beginning. You could tell the Bible believed in demons, because Jesus threw a bunch of them out of this guy. Real chuckalicious ones, too. When Jesus asked the guy who had them what his name was, the demons answered and told Him to go join the Foreign Legion. Or something like that.
Stephen King
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.
Stephen King
The Dark Powers have to give before they can take.
Stephen King
So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.
Stephen King
He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet.
Stephen King
Those are the only to verbalizations usually that we make in movies—either to scream or to laugh—because those two reactions are rather close. Most things we laugh at are things that are really horrible, when you think about them. It’s funny and you don’t scream, as long as it’s not you. If it’s somebody else you can laugh.
Stephen King
Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Stephen King
He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.
Stephen King
The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.
Stephen King
When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
Stephen King
He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.
Stephen King
...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.
Stephen King
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
Stephen King
Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.
Stephen King
I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.
Stephen King
He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
Stephen King
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Stephen King
You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.
Stephen King
Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners.
Stephen King
There’s no tonic like an old friend.
Stephen King
God makes it all come right in the end, that's what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I believe that: we're stuck with what we have, but that's all right; in God's eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way.
Stephen King
You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.
Stephen King
There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think 'This isn't the way our lives are supposed to be going.' Then I'd think 'Half the world has the same idea.
Stephen King
…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.
Stephen King
And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It's homicidal endless formless hungry being.
Stephen King
Better to be dirty than dead.
Stephen King
It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?
Stephen King
Life is more than love and pleasure,I came to dig for treasure.If you want to play, you gotta pay,You know it's always been that wayWe all came digging for treasure.
Stephen King
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
Stephen King
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.
Stephen King
At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.
Stephen King
... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.
Stephen King
You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. 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
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. 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.
Stephen King
Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?
Stephen King
It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.
Stephen King
Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. "Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.
Stephen King
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...
Stephen King
And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
Stephen King
You're a dangerous fool who should be sent west," he told the unconscious man. "You have forgotten the face of your father.
Stephen King
..Thirty's the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.
Stephen King
Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.
Stephen King
Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.
Stephen King
This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time.
Stephen King
But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.
Stephen King
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...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
The last good time always comes
Stephen King