Stephen King Quotes

The situation comes first...the characters...come next...[then] begin to narrate.

And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

Why does everyone think that I am a cruel and insensitive man? I mean, come on, I have kids... on my desk in little jars!

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.

The ghost story movie that scared me the most was The Changeling with George C. Scott. I think that's sometimes overlooked, but it's a wonderful piece of work.

When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

If it's OK to register cars and license drivers, why is it not OK to impose similar legal responsibilities on gun owners?

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

There seems to be no air in the air she breaths.

In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.

...it was more like bleeding than crying.

What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign.

If life teaches anything at all it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes that there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have.

He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers.

no one dies happy, you can only die well

Kill if you will, but command me nothing!

Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it.

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

The Overlook was still not done with him. Written on the mirror, not in lipstick but in blood, was a single word: REDRUM

The world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever.

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.

I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.

Showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don't want to do any of that.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

I have two amazing things in my life: I'm pain-free and I'm debt-free.

The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.

I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

I don't really map anything out. I just let it happen [while writing]. But once it happens, it's always there. If it's laid, it's played. If I get to page 300 and it's not working, I junk it.

I identify with the characters very closely. At the same time that I'm outside, writing, I'm also inside, experiencing, and it can be very unsettling.

As a kid, death seemed boring to me. As an adult, I think that it seems more like a waste of everything. Somebody once said every time a professor dies, a library burns.

I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts.

As we get older, our fears, in some way, sharpen and become more personal, because we can no longer - let's say take a book like "It" or maybe "Christine," and say these are make-believe fears.

I start work around 8 a.m. and usually finish around noon. If there's more to do, I do it in the late afternoon, although that isn't prime time for me.

I started writing seriously when I was about 12. I am always in the mood.

I get inspiration, a lot of times, from very commonplace things that just strike a chord and develop themselves in the subconscious.

I am religious in the sense that I believe in God and I believe that there is an abiding logical spirit that controls what goes on to a certain extent.

I never met a writer who wasn't lazy.

Scaring people, especially in our day and time, is one of the hardest things on earth, as far as I am concerned.

I’ve always said to people, "I don’t care what you call me as long as the checks don’t bounce and the family gets fed." But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.

Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.

The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated.