Stephen King Quotes & Sayings

It's as if there's a fumble-fingered but powerful universal force at work, always trying to put wrong things right. — Stephen King

You still owe a debt. Pay it. — Stephen King

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been ... And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip ... at least until it proves otherwise. — Stephen King

When I was a kid, my mother said, 'Stephen if you were a girl, you'd always be pregnant. — Stephen King

Do you serve towels with your showers, Stuttering Bill? — Stephen King

Loosen up, " Mr. Keene said again. "Most of your trouble, Eddie, comes from being so tight and stiff all the time. Take your asthma, for instance. Look here. — Stephen King

The field has never been highly regarded; for a long time the only friends that Poe and Lovecraft had were the French, who have somehow come to an arrangement with both sex and death, an arrangement that Poe and Love-craft's fellow Americans certainly had no patience with. The Americans were busy building railroads, and Poe and Lovecraft died broke. — Stephen King

He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on. — Stephen King

All I'm focusing on is pickin' 'em up and layin' 'em down. — Stephen King

Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But at the same time there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar. And you have to wonder about that guy's personality, the big guy's personality. — Stephen King

What a paragon of virtue you are, gunslinger! the man in black laughed. — Stephen King

When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped. — Stephen King

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. — Stephen King

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl's tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being's wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die
(any time!)
and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child's hands could feel. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love. — Stephen King

Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal; it's only because you are my love. — Stephen King

THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining. — Stephen King

I don't know if a little tickle of psychic ability means we are divine; there are plenty of people who can accept the miracle of eyesight without believing that eyesight proves the existence of God ... — Stephen King

It was always a pleasure to write. I can never think of a time when I just hacked something out to fulfil a contract or meet a deadline. I might have hacked things out, but it was always stuff I loved. — Stephen King

Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire. — Stephen King

There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall." "Uh-huh," Eddie said. "There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can't get snot off a suede jacket. — Stephen King

home and there it sits on the counter, going sour. — Stephen King

Andy gave me a leatherbound Bible (which I also read, mostly to spite him) — Stephen King

You know the three Ages of Man, don't you?" Hodges asks. Pete shakes his head, grinning. "Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific. — Stephen King

When a man has died, he wants you to know about it. — Stephen King

What Jack didn't understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane. — Stephen King

You cant be too careful on a skateboard. — 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

They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success - as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same. — Stephen King

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one. — Stephen King

He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight. — Stephen King

Case closed, game over, zip up your fly. — Stephen King

Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the "mob instinct" should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we're told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration . . . but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

Churchbells were calling the faithful to worship, and outside it was a beautiful day — Stephen King

You reading this have undoubtedly met yours (or will); I met mine, and I'm sure he'll be back. He's got my address. He's a mean guy, a Bad Lieutenant, the sworn enemy of goofery, fuckery, pride, ambition, loud music, and all things nineteen. But — Stephen King

You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn't question knowing. — Stephen King

His rest was thing and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. — Stephen King

But there was only that silence, as in the five or ten minutes before a vicious thundersquall strikes, when the purple heads stack up in the sky overhead and the light turns a queer purple-yellow and the wind dies completely. — Stephen King

You know when your feet get wet you always get a cold, Eddie - you're not like other people, you have a very weak system, you have to be careful. That's why you must always wear your rubbers when it rains. — Stephen King

Billy Ederle's leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy. — Stephen King

You're a goddam funny kid, Clivey," he said. "I got sixteen grandchildren, and there's only two of em that I think is gonna amount to duckshit, and you ain't one of em - although you're on the runner-up list - but you're the only one that can make me laugh until my balls ache. — Stephen King

In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies. — Stephen King

The woman who entered had the plump, matronly figure of the Good Gramma in a children's story and the beady eyes of a dick in a department store. — Stephen King

For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching ... by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. — Stephen King

It's worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it'll probably keep working. — Stephen King

If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing. — Stephen King

Pushed forward. A flying elbow struck his cheekbone just below his — Stephen King

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows — Stephen King

Love is what moves the world, I've always thought ... it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down ... bring them low ... and make them crawl ... — Stephen King

We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do. — Stephen King

Some things it don't pay to be curious about. — Stephen King

I once read a very funny piece called "The Essential Gone with the Wind" that went something like this: " 'A war?' laughed Scarlett. 'Oh, fiddle-de-dee!' "Boom! Ashley went to war! Atlanta burned! Rhett walked in and then walked out! " 'Fiddle-de-dee,' said Scarlett through her tears, 'I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day.' " I — Stephen King

Fear is fertile and rage is its offspring.. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death? — Stephen King

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

There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.
Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone.
Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out. Mooshed. No loss of talent in that mess. Morrie thought. — Stephen King

It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously. — Stephen King

The world has moved on,' we say ... we've always said. But it's moving on faster now. Something has happened to time. — Stephen King

There's two kinds of evil that horror fiction always deals with. One kind is the sort of evil that comes from inside people, like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other kind of evil is predestined evil. It falls on you like a stroke of lightning. That's the scary stuff, but, in a way, it's the stuff you don't have to worry about. I gotta worry whether or not I'm getting cavities. I gotta worry about whether cigarettes are giving me cancer. Those are things I can change. Don't give me lightning out of a clear sky. If that hits me I just say, "That's probably the way God meant it to be." — Stephen King

Some stains don't come out. — Stephen King

If God rewards us on earth for good deeds - the Old Testament suggests it's so, and the Puritans certainly believed it - then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones. — Stephen King

heard a foreman berating a clerk for sending an order to Des Moines instead of Davenport before the clerk had gotten the shipping form from the front office. — Stephen King

Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts. — Stephen King

My heart was full of hate and love and regret-all those things that have haunted me ever since. — Stephen King

Mostly because nobody with his kind of talent has a right to hide it from the world. — Stephen King

Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence. — Stephen King

And for fifty minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, between two o'clock and two fifty, I talk. How I do talk. — Stephen King

What would his father do then? Go on, Johnny supposed. People had a way of doing that, just going on, pushing through with no particular drama, no big drumrolls. — Stephen King

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this. — Stephen King

Me go! let me go and you can have everything you've ever wanted - money, fame, fortune, — Stephen King

When some people were in distress, you wanted to enfold them and say there-there as you patted them on the back. With others you wanted to slap them a hard one across the chops and tell them to man up. — Stephen King

The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies. — Stephen King

A good life is never wasted. — Stephen King

Getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner. — Stephen King

It was a moment he remembered for years after, as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time. If nothing fires between two people, such an instant simply falls back into the general wrack of memory. — Stephen King

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
How would that be? Just how would that be? — Stephen King

We all write fiction when we write about the past. — Stephen King

A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman. — Stephen King

But my father needed a job so he could finish a play he was working on . . . — Stephen King

It's been my experience (learned when I was just a wee lad with infected ears) that if a medical person tells you you're going to feel a little pinch, they're going to hurt you really bad. — Stephen King

Frankie and Carter Thibodeau would revert to what they'd been before: smalltown losers with little or no jingle in their pockets. — Stephen King

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it. — Stephen King

It didn't scare him the way he had thought it would. There was still the unshakable, blind assurances that this organism Ray Garraty could not die. The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not Ray Garraty, star of that long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

when straws are all you have, you grasp them. There — Stephen King

Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation. — Stephen King

Books were his Achilles heel. She — Stephen King

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write. — Stephen King

Sometimes I think life is a sad, bad business, Doc I really do. — Stephen King

Tony, Tony,come around, something's lost that can't be found. — Stephen King

Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb's Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons. — Stephen King

Pissing and thinking have a lot in common, he thought. You can put them both off. But not forever. — Stephen King

In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next. — Stephen King

I have a real problem with bloat
I write like fat ladies diet. — Stephen King

He had locked himself safely away in a place beyond pain. — Stephen King

At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back. — Stephen King

Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth. — Stephen King