Life Stephen King Quotes & Sayings

In retrospect, this seems to summarize all the insanity of that time. Guy is standing on top of a burning building. Helicopter arrives, hovers, drops a rope ladder. Climb up! the man leaning out of the helicopter's door shouts. Guy on top of burning building responds, Give me two weeks to think about it. — Stephen King

You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there's always a bloody show. — Stephen King

Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other. — Stephen King

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it. — Stephen King

a small few actually able to do those things of which men whisper - these few could call demons and the dead, could kill with a curse or heal with strange potions. One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg. He had seen him only briefly, and that had been near the end, as chaos and the final crash approached his land. Hot on his heels had come two young men who looked desperate and yet grim, men named Dennis and Thomas. These three had crossed only a tiny part of what had been a confused and confusing time in the gunslinger's life, but he would never forget seeing Flagg change a man who had irritated him into a howling dog. He remembered that well enough. — Stephen King

I wouldn't doubt it, Jack said gravely. A roque court, a topiary full of hedge animals out front, what next? A life-sized Uncle Wiggily game behind the equipment shed? He was getting very tired of Mr. Stuart Ullman, but he could see that Ullman wasn't done. Ullman was going to have his say, every last word of it. — Stephen King

This is not a bad life. — Stephen King

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question. — Stephen King

Life was a short shelf that came with bookends. — Stephen King

I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. — Stephen King

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's Writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe. — Stephen King

Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celebrate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never petty) joys of our own lives. — Stephen King

I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer. — Stephen King

Better than cancer or Alzheimer's, that prime horror of anyone who has spent his life making a living by his wits. — Stephen King

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story. — Stephen King

I love my life and my wife and kids, but I've always been somewhat quasi-suicidal, constantly wanting to push things past the edge. — Stephen King

The wheels of progress; sooner or later they took you back to where you started from. — Stephen King

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

The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died. — Stephen King

I believe in evil, but all my life I've gone back and forth about whether or not there's an outside evil, whether or not there's a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. — Stephen King

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. — Stephen King

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

It's also important to remember that no one is "the bad guy" or "the best friend" or "the whore with a heart of gold" in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby. — Stephen King

May be she'll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain. — Stephen King

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life...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

No one pronounced Jerusalems Lot dead
on the morning of October 6;
no one knew it was.
Like the bodies of previous days
it retained every semblace of life — Stephen King

I am led irresistibly to this conclusion: food may be life, but the source of power is faith, not food. And who is more capable of a total act of faith than a child? — Stephen King

You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served. — Stephen King

He looked so strange without his guns.
So wrong.
'Okay? Now that the numb-fuck apprentices have the guns and the master's unarmed, can we please go? If something big comes out of the bush at us, Roland, you can always throw your knife at it.'
'Oh, that,' he murmured. 'I almost forgot.' He took the knife from his purse and held it out, hilt first, to Eddie.
'This is ridiculous!' Eddie shouted.
'Life is ridiculous.'
'Yeah, put it on a postcard and send it to the fucking Reader's Digest.' Eddie jammed the knife into his belt and then looked defiantly at Roland. 'Now can we go?'
'There is one more thing,' Roland said.
'Weeping, creeping Jesus!'
The smile touched Roland's mouth again. 'Just joking,' he said.
Eddie's mouth dropped open. Beside him, Susannah began to laugh again. The sound rose, as musical as bells, in the morning stillness. — Stephen King

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life. — Stephen King

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. — Stephen King

In bowling and in life, if a person made the spares, the strikes would take care of themselves. — Stephen King

When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been. — Stephen King

The fox who end up living the life they expected are more often than not end up taking sleeping pills or taking the barrel of a gun and pulling the trigger. — Stephen King

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world
— Stephen King

There were no horror movies or horror books to speak of in the '40s. I picked the '50s because that pretty well spans my life as an appreciator - as somebody who's been involved with this mass cult of horror, from radio and movies and Saturday matinees and books. In the '40s there really wasn't that much. People don't want to read about horrible things in horrible times. So, in the '40s, there was Val Lutin with The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People and there wasn't much else. — Stephen King

A good life is never wasted. — Stephen King

The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life. — 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

Short Brief Story, How I started to make this which you see today?
I'm talking about the works, most people doubt about that I will become a writer. Most people said me this, you must drink a lot of teas, to become a writer (you must have a rich vocabulary and many other stuff!). But check out what Stephen King said in his book "Memoir and Craft" this
amazed me.
Most people know him as an actor or as an book writer...Maybe this can change some people opinions which didn't believe in me (in their opinions), I just show in my books a new world, YEAH I read some books in this time, I watched some films, I finished some games, some interesting stuff happened and many other things. But the best thing everything as much as possible was added in the books Series The Life Of One Kid! — Deyth Banger

I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something ... set yourself on something ... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies? — Stephen King

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

All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue
when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day
I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious. — Stephen King

I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why dos it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite? — Stephen King

You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. — Stephen King

It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive. — Stephen King

My life for you. I lay down my life you. — Stephen King

The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I. — Stephen King

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, 'what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for? — Stephen King

Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all. — Stephen King

Life would go on as it had. All of it, in a kind of endless summer. — Stephen King

You needn't die happy when your day comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served. — Stephen King

In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't life or approve of. — Stephen King

He had known a great deal about her before she knew he had any real interest in her, and that was just the way Tom wanted it. He had been looking for someone like Beverly Marsh all his life, and he moved in with the speed of a lion making a run at a slow antelope. Not that her vulnerability showed on the surface - you looked and saw a gorgeous woman, slim but abundantly stacked. — Stephen King

He thought one of the universal truths of life was that, sooner or later, someone always paid. — Stephen King

Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. — Stephen King

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful — 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

For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on. — Stephen King

This situation is not quite beyond saving, but should you carry on much further - should you give voice to such thoughts - it will be. — Stephen King

Gordie: Alright, alright, Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy?
Vern: If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That's easy-Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it.
Teddy: Goofy's a dog. He's definitely a dog.
Gordie: I knew the $64,000 question was fixed. There's no way anybody could know that much about opera!
Chris: He can't be a dog. He drives a car and wears a hat.
Gordie: Wagon Train's a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.
Vern: Oh, God. That's weird. What the hell is Goofy? — Stephen King

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again. — Stephen King

Sometimes you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them. — Stephen King

I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.
In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This ... and this ... and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home. — Stephen King

Philosophers have debated the meaning of life for centuries, rarely coming to the same conclusion. — Stephen King

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. — Stephen King

A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together-a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life. — Stephen King

He says there's a reason wife and life sound almost the same. — Stephen King

Get busy living or get busy dying. — Stephen King

Their lives had another forty seconds to run. — Stephen King

That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half-amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face - as if he was watching apes drink beer instead of men - could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses. — Stephen King

The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply! — Stephen King

And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites. — Stephen King

How to Draw a Picture (XII)
Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life. — Stephen King

I was struck to my heart and through my heart, knocked clean out of my ordinary life. — Stephen King

Remember, cool is not a way of life; it's a state of being. Like your height. I can't help being 6'3, and I can't help being cool. — 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

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

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

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

Shit don't mean shit — Stephen King

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself. — Stephen King

And people who don't dream, who don't have any kind of imaginative life, they must ... they must go nuts. I can't imagine that. — Stephen King

In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable ... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts ... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream. — Stephen King

The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to "Thou shalt not steal." Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God's name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore. — Stephen King

When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story. — Stephen King

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off. — Stephen King

I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions. — Stephen King

In spite of the problems he was having he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don't or won't or can't and plenty of them aren't in prison either. — Stephen King

To friends! Life belongs to those who love, and where love reigns is man truly king! — Stephen R. Lawhead

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. — Stephen King

I'd like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing. — Stephen King

A song on the radio can bring back the past with fierce (if mercifully transitory) immediacy: a first kiss, a good time with your buddies, or an unhappy life-passage. — Stephen King

You must be human ... how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse. — Stephen King

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. — Stephen King

Your bullshit quotient is higher than my husband — Stephen King

For readers, one of life's more electrifying discoveries is that they ARE readers--not just capable of doing it...but in love with it...The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts... — Stephen King

She isn't a big deal, of course, except to the people who matter in her life, but since these are the only ones she cares about, that's fine. — Stephen King