Stephen King Quotes

Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.

~ Stephen King

Energy has a way of dissipating, you know; what can be done when you're eleven can often never be done again.

~ Stephen King

Pardon my French if you're a religious man.''I am,' Bill said, grinning.'Then get outta my cab and go to fucking church,' the cabbie said, and they both burst out laughing.

~ Stephen King

She looked out and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah's first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap's mother was *white.* Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality and how that must frost Detta Walker's racially sensitive butt!

~ Stephen King

Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.

~ Stephen King

I hope he died of intestinal cancer in a part of the world where morphine is as of yet undiscovered.

~ Stephen King

She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

~ Stephen King

The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.

~ Stephen King

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.

~ Stephen King

His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.

~ Stephen King

Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.

~ Stephen King

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? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…

~ Stephen King

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

~ Stephen King

Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky...more will want to do the former than the latter.

~ Stephen King

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

~ Stephen King

The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.

~ Stephen King

There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.

~ Stephen King

And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.

~ Stephen King

That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.

~ Stephen King

... what I'm doing in here isn't all that different from what I was doing outside. I'll hand you a pretty cynical axiom: the amount of financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.

~ Stephen King

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

~ Stephen King

The last good time always comes

~ Stephen King

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

~ Stephen King

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

~ Stephen King

This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know-by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time.

~ Stephen King

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

~ Stephen King

Hi,’ Jake said. ‘I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.’ ‘I was a lot younger ten minutes ago.

~ Stephen King

..Thirty's the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself.

~ Stephen King

And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.

~ Stephen King

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...

~ Stephen King

Not everyone believes in ghost’s, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?“ She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can’t get over the past,” Aunt Evie said. “That’s what ghost’s are. Not them.” She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. “The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.

~ Stephen King

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

~ Stephen King

Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?

~ Stephen King

You need to take out the stuff that’s just sitting there and doing nothing. No slackers allowed! All meat, no filler!

~ Stephen King

... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

~ Stephen King

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

~ Stephen King

At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style...but as we move along, you'd do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.

~ Stephen King

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

~ Stephen King