Quotes & Sayings About Fear Stephen King

Those old things were still painful to think about, still bright with the childish primary colors of fear and horror. — Stephen King

(how I wish you were fear) — Stephen King

A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels. — Stephen King

You know, I think some people fear that if they like the wrong kind of book, it will reflect poorly on them. It can go with genre, too. Somebody will say, "I won't read science fiction, or I won't read young adult novels" - all of those genres can become prisons. I always find it funny when the serious literary world will make a little crack in its wall and allow in one pet genre writer and crown them and say, "Well Elmore Leonard is actually a real writer." Or "Stephen King is actually a really good writer." Generally speaking, you know you're being patronized when somebody uses the word "actually — Elizabeth Gilbert

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear. — Stephen King

John's eyes turned to me ... I saw no resignation in them, no hope of heaven, no drawing peace. How I would love to tell you that I did. How I would love to tell myself that.
What I saw was misery ... fear, incompletion and incomprehension. They were the eyes of a trapped and terrified animal.
(The Green Mile/Paul Edgecomb character) — Stephen King

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

His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin. — Stephen King

The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?"
Yes."
My Imagination."
I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."
Then you have a small imagination."
Roland and Eddie — Stephen King

She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special ... but the world did not love people like that. The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden. — Stephen King

UR LOCAL's under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double. — Stephen King

And when It woke It would call them back, yes, back, because fear was fertile, its child was rage, and rage cried for revenge. — Stephen King

A crazy certainty had arisen in his mind: a hand - or perhaps a claw - was going to swim up from the grayness of the Kindle's screen, grab him by the throat, and yank him in. — 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

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky. — Stephen King

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered. — Stephen King

You laugh because what's fearful and unknown is also what's funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown's eternal power. — Stephen King

Why do people do that to gifted people? Is it jealousy? Fear? Both, maybe. But this kid had the advantage of knowing how good he was. — 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

She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown. — Stephen King

There's no room for anything but joy and fear, and joy ruled the house. Fear lived in the shack out back! — Stephen King

The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. (viii) — Stephen King

Fear is the emotion that makes us blind. — Stephen King

Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on - that's what I should have said. That's what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn't. Because maybe that's what she was afraid of. — Stephen King

We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. — Stephen King

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance ... and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families. — Stephen King

And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb his- its- peace,but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenceless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the world. — Stephen King

I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk. — Stephen King

There is a relationship between humor and fear. Think of all the gags you ever heard that have to do with dismemberment, or something that's horrible in one way or another, even if it's just horrible in the sense that somebody's being embarrassed. What do kids laugh at? Kids laugh if your fly's down. That's hilarious. But for the kid whose fly is down, it's a horrible situation. — Stephen King

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there ... — Stephen King

I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild - timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline - a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample - that fear may be intense. — Stephen King

Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-money in my pocket. That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess it's just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used it better. -Red — Stephen King

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run. — Stephen King

The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God's gunslinger. — Stephen King

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

Is this a case of "Do as I say, not as I do?" The reader has a perfect right to ask the question, and I have a duty to provide an honest answer. Yes. It is. You need only look back through some of my own fiction to know that I'm just another ordinary sinner. I've been pretty good about avoiding the passive tense, but I've spilled out my share of adverbs in my time, including some (it shames me to say it) in dialogue attribution. (I have never fallen so low as "he grated" or "Bill jerked out," though.) When I do it, it's usually for the same reason any writer does it: because I am afraid the reader won't understand me if I don't. I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. — Stephen King

Fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. — Stephen King

The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face ... and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown? — Stephen King

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on. — Stephen King

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting
not for the first time
on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood. — Stephen King

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two. — Stephen King

I tend to scare myself. — Stephen King

He had an idea all such blocks were probably fear-centered and basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it had detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. — Stephen King

It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it. 'You — Stephen King

Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear — Stephen King

Maybe he sells fear because he's got nothing else to sell. — Stephen King

I don't want your apology, least of all for being afraid," he said. "Without fear, what would we be? Mad dogs with foam on our muzzles and shit drying on our hocks. — Stephen King

She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice. — 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

It's not your bullets I fear, Roland. It's your idea of answers that scares me. — Stephen King

Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear. — 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

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time. — Stephen King

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life. — Stephen King

Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again. He had heard of drowning in a woman's eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear. — Stephen King

The wife whose sweetly given reply in the face of any problem would be, "Whatever you think is best, dear." Women, take note: a wife like that never needs to fear bubbling away the last of her life through a cut throat. — Stephen King

As we become aware of our own unavoidable termination, we become aware of the fear-emotion. And I think that, as copulation tends towards self-preservation, all fear tends towards a comprehension of the final ending. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark. — Stephen King

And begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn't you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don't build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores, and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like - whole mansions, if you have the energy. — Stephen King

God I am unlucky. I don't hate You, but I fear You are not my friend, nor any man's friend. — Stephen King

We turn from all we know and all we fear. — Stephen King

Fear not, daughter Zion," Stephen whispered. "See, your king is coming, seated on a donkey's colt ... " He spun to me, eyes flashing. "This is written of the Anointed One, in the book of Zechariah. You see, it is him! He orchestrates this with intention! — Ted Dekker

The old man's fave gleamed, memory-bound. Eddie did not glimpse the young man who had been (Gran-pere was too old for that), but in his rheumy eyes he saw the mixture of excitement and determination and sick fear which must have filled him that day. Must have filled them all. Eddie felt himself reaching out for it the way a hungry man will reach for food, and the old man must have seen some of this on his face, for he seemed to swell and gain vigor. Certainly this wasn't a reaction the old man had ever gotten from his grandson; Tian did not lack for bravery, say thankya, but he was a sodbuster for all that. This man, however, this Eddie of New York... he might live a short life and die with his face in the dirt, but he was no sodbuster. — Stephen King

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought. — Stephen King

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. — Stephen King

Terror - what Hunter Thompson calls "fear and loathing" - often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal - if it hits you around the heart - then it lodges in the memory as a complete set. — Stephen King

Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary. — Stephen King