Stephen King Quotes

We're friends here, I tell you - absolutely palsy-walsy. We'll break bread and speak of many things - oxen and oil-tankers and whether or not Frank Sinatra really was a better crooner than Der Bingle.

As the light swayed above him and the shadows danced and flapped, he began to swing the cane, bringing it down again and again, his arm rising and falling like a machine.

There's something oddly comforting about talking to a legal guy once the billable hours clock has started running; you have passed the magical point at which a lawyer becomes your lawyer. Your lawyer is warm, your lawyer is sympathetic, your lawyer makes notes on a yellow pad and nods in all the right places. Most of the questions your lawyer asks are questions you can answer. And if you can't your lawyer will help you find a way to do so, by God. Your lawyer is always on your side. Your enemies are his enemies. To him you are never shit but always Shinola.

...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?
Why are there no second choices?

Everything seemed to stand out with a special dearness, and although I never could have said that out loud I didn't think it mattered - maybe that sense of dearness was something I wanted just for myself.

Time-travelers lie a lot.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best erase it and try a new one.
If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy ... but he strongly hints at it.

He looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Sometimes I think life is a sad, sad business, Doc. I really do.

For your family, you do all that you can.

There was just so much poison inside me...

Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.

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

Out of the blue and into the black

What none of them knew, of course, was that Carrie White was telekinetic.

When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.

Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.

Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like.

Yet the laughter had a tinge of uneasiness about it, because this business about nineteen had gotten a trifle weird.

It's eternity in there.

He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat.

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.

Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.

I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.

We need to talk is Momspeak for Houston, we have a problem.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting
not for the first time
on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

Hunger is the piston of art.

Gimme the pill. I'm gonna fuck. She was of age. Why be coy?

I just saw myself as a novelist.

Speech destroys the functions of love, I think - that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn't what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I've made my life from the words, and I know that is so.

The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names. The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!

Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies full of stars like beds of cold jewels. And through it all, a dying wind of change blew, bringing with it the cinnamon smell of late October.

They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn't appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet's father or Jacob Marley or some other ...

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

Law enforcement: a case of good men doing bad chores.

Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world-not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses-at least a thousand, Scott
P.S. Everything the same. I love you.

The sorrow, he thought, was like a rock on the shoreline of the ocean. When one was sleeping it was as if the tide was in, and there was some relief. Sleep was like a tide which covered the rock of grief. When one woke, however, the tide began to go out and soon the rock was visible again, a barnacle-encrusted thing of inarguable reality, a thing which would be there
forever, or until God chose to wash it away.

I thought of how life had been before I realized I was a frog in a pot

He was only the second or third in his sprawling family (their religion, Skip once said, was Irish Alcoholic) to ever go to college. Clan

I believe that anyone using the phrase 'That's so cool' should have to stand in the corner.

I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.

If Timlin's right, he thought, the bloodsuckers will inherit the earth instead of the meek. If they can find any blood to suck, that is.

No bounce, no play.

Oversized retail operations of the sort that are called "outlets" (as if they were sewer drains rather than shopping locations).

I love my sons and I love that they are writers - I also love my daughter, who's a minister and an orchard keeper! - but I wouldn't wish the burden of Mid-World and the Dark Tower on them. I enjoy working with them, though, because we fit together.

The rational part of his mind told him she was just a fragment of unremembered bad dream that had followed him out of sleep and across the hall to the bathroom. That part insisted that if he opened the door again, there would be nothing there. Surely there wouldn't be, now that he was awake. But another part of him, a part that shone, knew better. The Overlook wasn't done with him.

Andy and Terry went into the kitchen to serve out the Neapolitan (which we called van-choc-straw . . . funny how it all

Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.

At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.

Sometimes [ ... ] real love is silent as well as blind.

When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped.

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.

Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.

As soon as you have a child, you see your own tombstone

all gods is one when it comes to thanks, so I've heard, and 'tis a good enough saying.

And that became my morning routine: orange juice, walk, yoghurt, current events. I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who anchors the headline news from six to ten AM. Boring routine, right? But the surface events of a country laboring under a dictatorship can appear boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators love boring - even as great changes are approaching beneath the surface.

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 realise once I was alone and all other voices dropped away. …Even the sudden and distressing bursts of anger weren't the heart of the matter.

That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don't know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone…other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn't much care.

God says, Sure, take away the safety net. And when that's gone, take away the tight rope too.

I'll be back as quick as I can," I said awkwardly.
"Sure."
"Stay cool."
"Don't worry, I'm not going to punch anybody."
I trotted to my car. As I slipped behind the wheel I heard the little girl ask Arnie loudly, "Why is your face all messy like that, mister?

Bill could smell Its breath and it was a smell like exploded animals lying on the highway at midnight.

When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.

At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe's castle surrounded by the Red Death. Horror is destroyed by boredom. Love is a dream.

They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty.

The technological society has walked off the court, so to speak, but they've left all the basketballs behind. Someone will come along who remembers the game and teach it to the rest again.

when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There

Don't you dare do it, Eddie! Don't you dare! Wet feet, that's one way - one of the thousands of ways - that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don't you do it!

Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was 'unfruitful,' a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore.

Sleep is often denied to those with secrets.

He had an instinct for mischief in his head, just as some people have a way with numbers or a clear sense of direction.

What if I fall?', Tim cried.
Maerlyn laughed. 'Sooner or later, we all do.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

As it happens, I think that in really good stories, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.

What do you read?"
I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer ー"Everything I can get my hands on!ー is true enough, but not helpful.

I have the world's best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.

Two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how 'twas done.

I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don't have any black marks against me before I start.

Now stop fucking around and look at the fishies. You know you want to.

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus ... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

All the logic in the world could not blunt the pain. Logic could not blunt her terrible sense of personal failure. Only time would do those things, and time would do an imperfect job.

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.

A man named Stephen King. Do you know that name? And saw by Cullum's eyes that he did.

I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don't we?

I'm going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I'm gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS.

Here is something I learned in 1922: there are always worse things waiting. You think you have seen the most terrible thing, the one that coalesces all your nightmares into a freakish horror that actually exists, and the only consolation is that there can be nothing worse. Even if there is, your mind will snap at the sight of it, and you will know no more. But there is worse, your mind does not snap, and somehow you carry on. You might understand that all the joy has gone ...

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy.

Shake the hand that shook the world.

What Jack didn't understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane.

Lisbon Taxi,' a woman said, 'where the mileage is always smileage. How may we help you today?

A woman's love is strange and cruel and nearly always clear-sighted, love that sees is always horrible love, and she knew walking away was right and so she walked, dismissing the cries as only another part of the boy's development, like smiles from gas or scraped knees.

I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one

I'm a situational writer. You give me a situation, like a writer gets in a car crash, breaks his leg, is kidnapped by his number-one fan, and is kept in a cabin and forced to write a book
everything else springs from there. You really don't have to work once you've had the idea. All you have to do is kind of take dictation from something inside. (from Parade Magazine interview, 5/26/13)

It has a way of eroding barriers-that famous Yankee reticence-which would otherwise be impregnable.

A week and a half later two feet of snow lay white and crisp and even on the grounds of the Overlook Hotel.

It wasn't just love that held people together. There was secrets, and the price you paid to keep them.

Sometimes it takes heart to write about a thing, doesn't it? To let that thing out of the room way in the back of your mind and put it up there on the screen.

Eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business,

I'm sorry I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture!

In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves.