Stephen King Quotes - Page 3

Misery suffered did not justify misery to come.

Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.

I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

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?

There was nothing … and nothing … and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis’s head was gone.

Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. "I think this is it.

I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

Pain rises. From the heart to the head pain rises.

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.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.

It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought.

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?

That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead.

The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.

The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.

Of course we're friends ... we are both civilized men, aren't we? We've shared bed and board and bottle. We'll always be friends, and the dog collar I have on you will always be ignored by mutual consent, and I'll take good and benevolent care of you. All I ask in return is your soul. Small item. We can even ignore the fact that you've handed it over, the way we ignore the dog collar.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

Without story books is like a person with no soul.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.

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.

A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away.

Some things were better lost than found.

George, I’m sorry!” he cried through his tears. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I’m suh-suh-SORRY—” And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn’t know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.

Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.

It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.

Don't think I know you," Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry's hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can't afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can't afford the zoo, go see a politician.

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?

By definition, though, we are family. And in difficult times-- times like these-- despite our differences, we stand together as family.

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.

...staring into thin air at thosethings only cats can see (Doctro Sleep)

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.

that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died.

You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?

I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

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.

You've got to go to Boston, and you've got to go there NOW!!

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.

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.

Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

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.

The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.

The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.