Stephen King Quotations

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

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

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

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

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, 'Why god? Why me?' and the thundering voice of God answered, 'There's just something about you that pisses me off.'

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

He had a massive stroke. 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?

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

My heart was pounding, and I was sweating like I was there.

I can function and I couldn't have ever done that before this treatment,

I think for many people there'll be no middle ground.

We know that they obtained these bodies in a fraudulent way and off the scale of acceptable practice.

That whole program took on a life of its own.

Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

We think this week they keep rates unchanged but I think there is a reasonable chance of rates coming down in July and August and on the back of a continuously weakening European economy.

If you don't have time to read, then you have more time to write. Simple as that.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

Publicly, I have always expressed a great deal of confidence in human nature, but in private I have wondered if anybody would ever pay for anything on the Net, ... It now looks as though people will, and I am faced with the real possibility of finishing 'The Plant.'

Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that's not true. I have the heart of a young boy -- in a jar on my desk.

You needn't die happy when your day comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end.

...So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

I'm curious to see what sort of response there is and whether or not this is the future,

I'm delighted to know that my future with Scribner, Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster Audio is secure.

I want some sort of guarantee that Mr. Harmon is going to do his time in Montana.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart wants what the heart wants.

The U.S. economy is continuing to weaken, ... We are bearish over the next few months. The beige book continues to show weakness in the U.S.

The U.S. economy is continuing to weaken. We are bearish over the next few months. The beige book continues to show weakness in the U.S.

Capital has mobility in Europe. German companies are able to tell workers that they can either accept reduced pay, or see the company close factories and reopen new ones in Poland or India.

I don't think my books would've have been as successful as they are if the readers didn't think they were in the hands of a true crazy person. When I start a story, I don't know where it's going.

All signals are that European growth is slowing, however, the euro zone will avoid a hard landing, compared with the U.S., which has a lot of structural imbalances brought on by a boom cycle.

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

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

I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

You have to go where the book leads you.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.

Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

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.

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.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory. She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.