Stephen King Quotes
Dreams age faster than dreamers.
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It’s accepted because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
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.
JK Rowling created seven Horcruxes. She put a part of her soul in every book and now her books will live forever
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.
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. Or you don’t.
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.
If you have given up your heart … you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
no knowledge obtained without risk
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
I do not kill with my gun; He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
There are books full of great writing that don’t have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story… don’t be like the book-snobs who won’t do that. Read sometimes for the words–the language. Don’t be like the play-it-safer who won’t do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, a treasure that book.
No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
If you were a real fascistic society and you had a vocal minority that was shouting, “Stop this, stop that, stop the other thing,” what you would say is, “Let’s give them all the drugs they want.” In a lot of states, something very much like that happened. They lowered the drinking age to eighteen and said, “Get juiced.
The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood’s dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.
Books are uniquely portable magic.
I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.
The things a man sees when he ain’t got a gun.–Watson the Caretaker
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
The age of the book is not over. No way… But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes ‘Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel’ and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don’t interest me. Why? I don’t know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.
Books are uniquely portable magic.
One night when my longing for her was like a fire burning out of control in my heart and my head, I wrote her a letter that just seemed to go on and on. I poured out my whole heart in it, never looking back to see what I’d said because I was afraid cowardice would make me stop. I didn’t stop, and when a voice in my head clamored that it would be madness to mail such a letter, that I would be giving her my naked heart to hold in her hand, I ignored it with a child’s breathless disregard of the consequences.
See the BEAR of fearsome size! All the WORLD’S within his eyes. TIME grows thin, the past is a riddle; The TOWER awaits you in the middle.
Terrifying. A Dark Matter is populated with vivid, sympathetic characters, and driven by terrors both human and supernatural. It’s the kind of book that’s impossible to put down once it has been picked up. It kept me reading far into the night. Straub builds otherworldly terror without ever losing touch with his attractive cast of youngsters, who age beautifully. Put this one high on your list.
For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.
Little kids’ minds are very, very strong. They bend. There’s a lot of tensile strength and they don’t break. We start our kids off on things like “Hansel and Gretel,” which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it.
If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read
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Stephen King Quotes it
Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.
Maybe there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends – maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, 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 Quotes about The Past
A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.
It’s funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?
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 Quotes about age
Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?
My childhood was pretty ordinary, except at a very early age, I wanted to be scared. I just did. I was scared afterward. I wanted a light on because I was scared that there was something in the closet. My imagination was very active, even at a young age.
A kid of your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?
Stephen King Quotes on Love
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.
Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You… you fill me up.
Stephen King Quotes on Fear
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’ve met tale spinners before, Jake, and they’re all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they’re afraid of life.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear
Stephen King Quotes The Shining
The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.
But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.
Stephen King Quotes about Children
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.
Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he
Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.
Stephen King Quotes on Horror
And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.
There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.
He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.
Stephen King Quotes on Death
Death is when the monsters get you.
When a man has died, he wants you to know about it.
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Stephen King Quotes on Reading
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair
Stephen King Quotes on Friendship
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?
Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
Stephen King Quotes on Guns
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.
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.
Stephen King Quotes on Life
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
No matter how many times you shake it the last drop always ends up in your pants
But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
Stephen King Quotes about Risk
This is how a man looks when he’s deciding that the risk of death is better than the risk of change.
Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don’t waste the one or increase the other, if you please.
there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.
Stephen King Quotes The Stand
That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fakery.
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-Fu in the face of my enemies. Amen
The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there…and still on your feet.
Christine Quotes by Stephen King
As soon as you have a child, you see your own tombstone
Maybe that’s one of the ways you recognize really lonely people . . . they can always think of something neat to do on rainy days. You can always call them up. They’re always home. Fucking always. For
I always like to see enlightened parents like that; it gives me hope for the future.
Stephen King Quotes about Change
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 Quotes on Writing
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
