Stephen King Quotes - Page 2

Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

...we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions on front of you. And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night...and what your dreams are like.

Shit. The mind gets up to funny tricks, doesn't it? Shadows grow faces.

Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class.

What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.

You have come from the shadow of the heroin and the shadow of your brother, my friend. Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Several times we had been very close to "it," but "it" just never quite happened. She always drew back, and I never pressed her. God help me, I was being gallant. I have wondered often since what would have changed (for good or for ill) had I not been. What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash.

Those aren't doors, and they're not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. They're cracking open and the vampires you thought were dead are all flying out again.

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.

Time and tide wait for no man.

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.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.

Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought.

The trap had a ghastly perfection

Black as night and as beautiful as forever.

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.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club.

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.

Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!

Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years.

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.

What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

(...) if that's waht has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.

...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...

Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.

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.

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

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),...

His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.

He didn’t like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

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. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.

Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.

I will scream as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream...but there is no one there to hear me.

I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.

Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.

What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be

Words have weight.

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…

Lend me your wings, bird. I'll spread them and fly on the thermals.

If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.

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.

Home is where they want you to stay longer

And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.

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.

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.