Stephen King And Quotes & Sayings

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

Dastardly devious, cleverly conceived, and just a whole lot of fun to read, DEATH PERCEPTION is Lee Allen Howard on fire and at his finest. Rife with winsome weirdness, it's like the mutant stepchild of Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, mixing a truly unique paranormal coming-of-age story with a quirky cast of offbeat noir characters into a novel that's simply unforgettable ... and hilariously original. A supernatural crime story, blazing with creative intrigue ... don't miss it. — Michael Arnzen

And then the world exploded. — 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

Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it. — Stephen King

Do you know the phrase watershed moment, buddy?" I nodded. You didn't have to be an English teacher to know that one; you didn't even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others include connect the dots and at this point in time. — Stephen King

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

More than anything else I wanted to get inside my readers' defenses, wanted to rip them and ravish them and change them forever with nothing but story. And I felt I could do those things. I felt I had been made to do those things. — Stephen King

You may wonder about long-term solutions. I assure you, there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what's given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what? Bless the slack and don't waste your breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing. — Stephen King

Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true. — 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

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

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

I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight. — Stephen King

If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable,I'm going to kill myself,because I won't know what else to do — 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

The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. — Stephen King

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. — 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

If you haven't considered it already, consider it now: there is every possibility that some of us, or all of us, may live and triumph, only to stand trial for murder. — Stephen King

Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they've got right on their side. — 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

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.. — Stephen King

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

And what do you do when you can't use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth. — Stephen King

Come down and eat chicken with me beautiful. It's soooo dark. — 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

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

I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics ... culture ... history ... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean ... ' He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. 'I mean ... can't you guys just let a story be a story? — Stephen King

Anger is the most useless emotion," Henchick intoned, "destructive to the mind and hurtful to the heart. — Stephen King

I can love you if you're a man, and I can love you if you're a hero- I guess, although for some reason that seems a lot harder- but I don't think I can love a vigilante. — 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

Asbestos at that time and had all developed lung — Stephen King

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one ... — 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

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king. — Stephen King

Tell her this
And more,
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With surplus of toys. — Stephen Crane

It was safer to walk softly, and surer to ask instead of telling. — Stephen King

One of these fellows had crawled out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street one day and had offered to give Eddie a blowjob for a quarter. — Stephen King

Fuck your warning. And fuck your mother. Either shoot me or get out of my house. — Stephen King

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. — Stephen King

Paul LePage has become a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love. If he won't govern, he should resign. — Stephen King

It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant. "Taxes," Big Ross said, and laughed - but not in a funny way. — Stephen King

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

In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It's silence that is a marriage's best friend. — Stephen King

Through most of what followed there were two of me on the phone, George who was speaking out loud and Jake on the inside, saying all the things George couldn't. Maybe there are always two on each end of the conversation when good love hangs in the balance. — Stephen King

Every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go ... — Stephen King

The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium. — 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

There's three things ye can do in any situation, girl," her father had told her once. "Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing ... or ye can decide not to decide." That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn't needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. — Stephen King

In everyone lives the person called "Monk" (From the Series), the families which are shown by Stephen King and many other people. But when people will understand this? — Deyth Banger

The two things are like apples and oranges, Annie. People who tell stories usually can't write stories. — Stephen King

Villages were burning under unknown constellations, people were screaming, and that touch on his neck . . . that awful touch — Stephen King

Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing. — Stephen King

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step. — Stephen King

There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first. — Stephen King

While I love each and every item, I'm happy to sell them, because I made them especially for you. Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A week and a half later two feet of snow lay white and crisp and even on the grounds of the Overlook Hotel. — Stephen King

I hope you come to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through the pages to the ending ... endings are heartless. An ending is a door no man can open. — Stephen King

When the sun was fully up, the gunslinger moved on west. He would find another horse eventually, or a mule, but for now he was content to walk. All that day he was haunted by a ringing, singing sound in his ears, a sound like bells. Several times he stopped and looked around, sure he would see a dark following shape flowing over the ground, chasing after as the shadows of our best and worst memories chase after, but no shape was ever there. He was alone in the low hill country west of Eluria. Quite alone. — Stephen King

Well . . . he don't bite and he don't bide, so fuck him. — Stephen King

They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty. — Stephen King

In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.) — Stephen King

In the old tongue which had once been his world's lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however - char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo - had only one. Char meant death. — Stephen King

Theres a constant struggle going on about how much will be illegal and how much you will be free to take. Can we open the pharmacies? Can we put Valium and Percodan and those sorts of things out on the shelves? I wouldn't take it. I don't know. — 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

It's his voice that I remember, certainly: my father's voice, low and slow, how he would chuckle sometimes or laugh outright. — 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

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

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

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