Stephen King Quotes

Atonement was powerful, it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.

~ Stephen King

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

~ Stephen King

I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

~ Stephen King

What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

~ Stephen King

When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

~ Stephen King

By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

~ Stephen King

Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.'And desire,' Beverly said.

~ Stephen King

When you’retwenty-one, life is a roadmap.It’s only when you get to betwenty-five or so that youbegin to suspect you’ve beenlooking at the map upsidedown, and not until you’reforty are you entirely sure.

~ Stephen King

But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.

~ Stephen King

She looked beautiful,standing there barefoot in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.Instead, I left her where she was. That's not the world we live in, she'd said, and how right she was

~ Stephen King

We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.Close enough.

~ Stephen King

Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome.

~ Stephen King

... good advice was sometimes easier to give than receive.

~ Stephen King

I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

~ Stephen King

By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing 'Ave Maria'.

~ Stephen King

People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.

~ Stephen King

She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

~ Stephen King

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.

~ Stephen King

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

~ Stephen King

He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.

~ Stephen King

...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.

~ Stephen King

The truth is that most writers are needy.

~ Stephen King

It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that way leads on to way; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.

~ Stephen King

But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.

~ Stephen King

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.

~ Stephen King

Ka was a wheel, it was also a net from which none ever escaped.

~ Stephen King

Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.

~ Stephen King

If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.

~ Stephen King

There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.

~ Stephen King

They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King