Stephen King Quotes

I'd like to learn French well enough to write in that language.

I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.

A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die.

I think we rarely recognize the fifth business in our lives at the time those people are changing us.

I never have a thematic intention at the outset.

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.

I'm not the first person to have said this - no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.

I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with.

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.

Hemingway sucks. If I set out to write that way, it would have been been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me.

Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess.

I choose to believe in God because it makes things better.

Cold start is a hard start.

I hardly ever read mainstream fiction that deals with life as it is. I like an element of fantasy, something that isn't quite of the real world.

My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.

God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.

When you ask me what I'm afraid of, I'd say I still go to see ghost movies when I get a chance or some sort of supernatural being, but it doesn't scare me as it scared me when I was a child.

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.

Did it [cocaine] for about eight years. Not a terribly long time to be an addict I guess, but it is longer than World War II.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.

Am I weird?""Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird.

Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let's all walk a little faster

Words have weight.

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

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary

And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.

I don't care so much about what you can stand or what you can manage as I do about what you like and want to have. Those are the kinds of things I want to give you, because I'm crazy about you.

Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed.

Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.

He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.

Help us to be true, Lord. Help us to stand.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.

He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.

Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented.

The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go