Stephen King Quotes

It is the tale, not he who tells it.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

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

You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

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.

never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.

I tend to scare myself.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

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

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

I'm going to be dead for a long time, so I have a lot to do now.

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

Even when love isn't enough...somehow it is.

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

I don't have nightmares; I give them all to you.

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.

And didn't they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

Outside, a gusty October breeze was combing leaves from the trees and sending them across her backyard in colorful skitters.

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm.

because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.

Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent.

Small towns harbor small imaginations.

Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.

A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

I have the world's best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.

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

High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up.

He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes. - Doctor Sleep

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.

It's not the pain I'm afraid of; I know about the pain. What I'm afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

I did spend years as an addict, so I know that world, although I wish I didn't.

Definition of a wanderer: a guy who's always looking beyond.

Everyone loves something for nothing...even if it costs everything.