Stephen King Quotes - Page 3

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.
Stephen King
...staring into thin air at thosethings only cats can see (Doctro Sleep)
Stephen King
It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a tremendous cost.
Stephen King
... what I'm doing in here isn't all that different from what I was doing outside. I'll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount of financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.
Stephen King
That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.
Stephen King
And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
Stephen King
There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.
Stephen King
The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.
Stephen King
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.
Stephen King
When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.
Stephen King
Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.
Stephen King
The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
Stephen King
When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
Stephen King
I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.
Stephen King
Writing is the act of finding out what I think.
Stephen King
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
Stephen King
that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu.
Stephen King
He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.
Stephen King
His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.
Stephen King
Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.
Stephen King
Kindle, isn’t it?” the waitress asked. “I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I’m reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult’s books.” “Oh, probably not all of them,” Wesley said. “Huh? Why not?” “She’s probably got another one done already. That’s all I meant.” “And James Patterson’s probably written one since he got up this morning!” she said, and went off chortling.
Stephen King
The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.
Stephen King
She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.
Stephen King
I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.
Stephen King
Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.
Stephen King
She looked out and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah's first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap's mother was *white.* Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality and how that must frost Detta Walker's racially sensitive butt!
Stephen King
Pardon my French if you're a religious man.''I am,' Bill said, grinning.'Then get outta my cab and go to fucking church,' the cabbie said, and they both burst out laughing.
Stephen King
Energy has a way of dissipating, you know; what can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.
Stephen King
Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.
Stephen King
Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.” Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...
Stephen King
What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.
Stephen King
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
Stephen King
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
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.
Stephen King
It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.
Stephen King
Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.
Stephen King
There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.
Stephen King
Sleep is often denied to those with secrets.
Stephen King
Some things were better lost than found.
Stephen King
I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter - eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low - pressure time - that's one of the things I love about it),...
Stephen King
The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.
Stephen King
There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.
Stephen King
But the pistol, this Walther...it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?
Stephen King
Most people are sheep and sheep don't eat meat
Stephen King
Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.
Stephen King
Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
Stephen King
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King
True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just play-ground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
Stephen King
I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way.
Stephen King
She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.
Stephen King
Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.
Stephen King
Tim Stoutheart was afraid, too,” I said. “But he went on. I expect you to do the same.
Stephen King
A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.
Stephen King
Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.
Stephen King
The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices on the right side of your brain got.
Stephen King
Alone.Yes,that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
Stephen King
May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.
Stephen King
One man may shoot himself in the forehead with a .38 and wake up in the hospital. Another may shoot himself in the forehead with a .22 and wake up in hell...if there is such a place. I tend to believe it's here on earth, possibly in New Jersey.
Stephen King