King Stephen Quotes & Sayings

Facing a dangerous man was always a bad business, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing the dead, however, everything changed. — Stephen King

I'd rather die at the hands of a friend than an enemy. — Stephen King

Is there a different between Attention Deficit Disorder and daydreaming? He mused. Ah, there I go again. Focus, — Stephen R. King

Once upon a bye, before your grandfather's grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim — Stephen King

All of this was well meaning bullshit. But bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's secret sauce. — Stephen King

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged. — Stephen King

serious art came from . . . . out there! — Stephen King

For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong. — Scott Berkun

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. — Stephen King

History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music. — Stephen King

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation. — Stephen King

When your lover begins to talk about "offending" you, he's not your lover anymore. — Stephen King

Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky. — Stephen King

Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument. — Stephen King

Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. — Stephen King

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

Is it ghosts or just the mirror
That makes ya want to flee? — 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

I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. — Stephen King

A place is yours when you know where all the roads go. — Stephen King

By Annie Wilkes ...
If you can get into that chair all by yourself, Paul, she said at last, then I think you can fill in your f******* n's.
She then closed the door and locked it again. Paul sat looking at it for a long time, almost as if there was something to see. He was too flabberghasted to do anything else. — Stephen King

If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. — Stephen King

Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals. — Stephen King

Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story. — Stephen King

Sometimes, Dolores, sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto. — Stephen King

got to be regular if you want to be happy, — Stephen King

In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts. — Stephen King

It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand's Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. — Stephen King

The stench in the air grew steadily stronger, and the dark about us seemed to press like wool, as if jealous of the light which had temporarily deposed it after so many years of undisputed dominion. — Stephen King

That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right. — Stephen King

Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation. — Stephen King

Lester Coggins was a lifelong bachelor who as an adolescent had suffered nightmares of masturbating and looking up to see Mary Magdalene standing in his bedroom doorway. — Stephen King

If you found enough cat hairs in a person's house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere — Stephen King

Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way. — Stephen King

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out. — Stephen King

Relationship and connection happen in an indefinable space between people, a space that will never be fully known or understood by us. — Stephen King

Okay, the question is, 'What enormously popular novel by William Peter Blatty, set in the posh Washington D.C. suburb of Georgetown, concerned the demonic possesion of a young girl?' '
'Johnny Cash', Henry replied.
'Jesus Christ!' Tricks Postino yelled. 'That's what you say to everythin! Johnny Cash, that's what you say to fuckin everythin!'
'Johnny Cash is everything,' Heny replied gravely... — Stephen King

She stood watching a ritual she had seen many times before, yet which now seemed odd and extremely archaic; as if everything - the hill, the ox, the Mage, the cauldron, the king, the people looking on - everything belonged to a time so far away, so obscurely ancient that it could no longer be comprehended, only felt in the pulse of blood that flowed through her veins. — Stephen R. Lawhead

Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind. — Stephen King

The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain. — Stephen King

He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile. — Stephen King

It didn't occur to her that this was an amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger, after all, and shooting was her business. Besides, — Stephen King

Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed. — Stephen King

I fell in love with her partly because I understood what she was doing with her work. I fell because she understood what she was doing with it. I also fell in love because she was wearing a sexy black dress and silk stockings, the kind that hook with garters. — Stephen King

One of the things nobody tells you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps are the ones who have to make sure everything's picked up and locked away once the music ends. — Stephen King

And you, CONSTANT READER. Thank God you're still there after all these years. If you're having fun, I am, too. — Stephen King

You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism. — Stephen King

Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants. — Stephen King

Tim stared at the steel rod in the gloved hand. "Is that a magic wand?"
The Covenant Man appeared to consider. "I suppose so. Although it started life as the gearshift of a Dodge Dart, America's economy car, young Tim."
"What's America?"
"A kingdom filled with toy-loving idiots. It has no part in our palaver. — Stephen King

But nothing. Accept what's done, Louis, and follow your heart. We did what was right this time . . . at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong - wrong as hell. — Stephen King

We all die in time," the gunslinger said. "It's not just the world that moves on. — Stephen King

We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know. — Stephen King

Sometimes loving eyes don't see what they don't want to see. — Stephen King

I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister. — Stephen King

Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any. — Stephen King

Doctor Sleep - book (By Stephen King) is the best choice before going to bed! — Deyth Banger

He (Tom Riley) gestured toward the canvases in the main room. "What are they, really? I mean, no bullshit. Because - I wouldn't say this to very many people - they remind me of the way life was inside my head when I wasn't taking my pills."
"They're just make-believe," I (Edgar) said. "Shadows."
"I know about shadows," he said. "You just want to be careful they don't grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power's out. — Stephen King

Stand right there. If your ass loses contact with that wall, you are going to lose contact with life as you have always known it. You understand?
Roland — Stephen King

Instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. — Stephen King

Laughter, Susannah would later reflect, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny. — Stephen King

Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy. — Stephen King

I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss. — Stephen King

There's no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, — Stephen King

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day - will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them. — Stephen King

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding. — Stephen King

The strings that bind you tight to the map of your life, — Stephen King

Them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town - this was going on to the end of April - the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series. Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid's; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. — Stephen King

The year the Sox finish in the first division will be the year you stop stuttering, mushmouth, Richie said. — Stephen King

If you say, Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God, then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. — Stephen King

The lessons which I remember the longest are always the ones that are self-taught — 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

With no gods to pray to, Susan prayed to her father. — Stephen King

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you ... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it. — Stephen King

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. — Stephen King

There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world. — Stephen King

He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously. — Stephen King

Any writer takes inspiration from what they read and watch, and over their career works on forming their own voice. I think it was probably Stephen King who made me want to become a writer. — Tim Lebbon

If,' Roland said. 'An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long. — Stephen King

Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please!
Come in close where everyone can see!
I got a tale to tell, it isn't gonna cost a dime!
(And if you believe that,
we're gonna get along just fine.) — Stephen King

Only people you want, need to be with, people who build houses in your heart. — Stephen King

Everybody likes the ice cream man. — Stephen King

Life was a wheel, and it always came back around. — Stephen King

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done. — Stephen King

I've been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me. — Douglas Adams

When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. I was your teacher. — Stephen King

They discuss the characters as though they were living people, and ask frequently, 'What happened to so-and-so?' ... as if I got letters from them every now and again. — Stephen King

All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck. — Stephen King

If Pete Simmons had been twenty, he might have asked a lot of bullshit questions that didn't matter. — Stephen King

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous. — Stephen King

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

Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just
enjoy all that good food until it's time to ride the lightning. It won't be
long. — Stephen King

The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west. — Stephen King

What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination. — Stephen Helmes

Every troublemaker's excuse! Put it up your bum with the rest of the dirt! — 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

LISTEN CLOSELY, MY FRIENDS," Blaine's voice boomed. "THERE ARE LARGE STOCKPILES OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE CANISTERS UNDER THE CITY. I HAVE STARTED A SEQUENCE WHICH WILL CAUSE AN EXPLOSION AND RELEASE THIS GAS. THIS EXPLOSION WILL OCCUR IN TWELVE MINUTES. — Stephen King

Make-up covers a multitude of sins. — Stephen King

That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery. — Stephen King

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home's the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it's also the place where, once you're in there, they don't ever want to let you out. — Stephen King

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation. — Stephen King