Stephen King Quotes

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revi

~ Stephen King

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

~ Stephen King

His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin.

~ Stephen King

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?

~ Stephen King

(...) if that's what 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.

~ Stephen King

We was used to each other in the way I s'pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they're a long way from what you'd call the best of friends.

~ Stephen King

He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want,need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart .

~ Stephen King

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.

~ Stephen King

The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.

~ Stephen King

Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

Memory is the basis of every journey.

~ Stephen King

At such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

~ Stephen King

Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

~ Stephen King

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.

~ Stephen King

The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.

~ Stephen King

Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else – someone like the blonde ticket-seller.

~ Stephen King

And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb his- its- peace,but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenceless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the world.

~ Stephen King

They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

~ Stephen King

His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

~ Stephen King

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.

~ Stephen King

Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the drivers'-seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.

~ Stephen King

He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just... come out the other side.

~ Stephen King

I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?

~ Stephen King

Go with your bad self.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

~ Stephen King

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

~ Stephen King

Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.

~ Stephen King

At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.

~ Stephen King