Variant: When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Variant: Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Source: The Shining 1977

“He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“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.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

“love is what moves the world, I've always thought… it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down… bring them low… and make them crawl…”

Stephen King

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

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It (1986)

“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Some things were better lost than found.”

Stephen King book The Dead Zone

Source: The Dead Zone

“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.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft