Stephen King Quotes - Page 4

Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any.

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

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

Time and tide wait for no man.

And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.

remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.

I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I'd had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

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.

There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Black as night and as beautiful as forever.

We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.

Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.

A kid of your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?

...some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt

Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

Four young men in motorcycle jackets... set upon the man in khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board.

He didn’t like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Each year the world Rich lived in felt more and more like a huge electronic haunted house in which digital ghosts and frightened human beings lived in uneasy coexistence.

A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.

The choice, as Eddie saw it, was as simple as it was brutal: get moving and keep moving or stand in one place long enough to start thinking about what all of this meant and simply die of fright.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.

Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.Art consists of the persistence of memory.

...most of what bein human's about is making choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don't give a person leave to just walk away from em... In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

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

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.

It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.

Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought.

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.

She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.

That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy.

A person can't change all at once.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

I will scream as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream...but there is no one there to hear me.

Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about controlabout who issnapping the whip, who is saying no, and who is saying go. Censorship's bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don't want just to make sure it's kept from my kid; I want to make sure it's kept from your kid, as well, and all the kids. This bit of intellectual arrogance, undemocratic and as old as time, is best expressed this way: "If it's bad for me and my family, it's bad for everyone's family."Yet when books are run out of school classrooms and even outof school libraries as a result of this idea, I'm never much disturbed not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher . . . which I used to be. What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.

Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.

The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.

Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.

There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.

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

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!

He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger's name was Hope. Williams produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.