Stephen King Quotes

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

~ Stephen King

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

~ Stephen King

Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

~ Stephen King

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

~ Stephen King

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall. As always, the marvelous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun.

~ Stephen King

It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

~ Stephen King

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

~ Stephen King

remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.

~ Stephen King

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it.

~ Stephen King

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

~ Stephen King

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

~ Stephen King

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

~ Stephen King

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

~ Stephen King

What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I've never held much of a brief for reality, at least in my written work. All too often it is to the imagination what ash stakes are to vampires.

~ Stephen King

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

~ Stephen King

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

~ Stephen King

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

~ Stephen King

It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.

~ Stephen King

But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?

~ Stephen King

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

~ Stephen King

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

~ Stephen King

Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.

~ Stephen King

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.

~ Stephen King

Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.

~ Stephen King

Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.

~ Stephen King

The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go

~ Stephen King

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

~ Stephen King

She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

~ Stephen King

Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?

~ Stephen King

He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.

~ Stephen King

About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. 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

I know how bad you boys feel, but the sun will still come up tomorrow. And when it does, you 'll feel better. When the sun comes up the day after tomorrow, a little better still. This is just a part of your life, and it's over. It would have been better to win, but either way, it's over. Life will go on.

~ Stephen King

Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard

~ Stephen King

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

~ Stephen King

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

~ Stephen King

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

~ Stephen King

Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother

~ Stephen King

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think... it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.

~ Stephen King

Time's the thief of memory

~ Stephen King

Time heals all wounds.

~ Stephen King