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Stephen King Quotes
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Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television series, and comic books. King has published 54 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and six non-fiction books. He has written around 200 short stories, most of which have been collected in book collections.

His novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was the basis for the film The Shawshank Redemption which is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.

Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.

✵ 21. September 1947
Stephen King photo
Stephen King: 733 quotes191 likes

Stephen King Quotes

“But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.”

Stephen King book Cujo

Source: Cujo

“It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.”

Stephen King

Source: Wolves of the Calla

“If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?”

Stephen King book Full Dark, No Stars

Source: Full Dark, No Stars

“As for the end of the universe…I say let it come as it will, in ice, fire, or darkness. What did the universe ever do for me that I should mind its welfare?”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.”

Stephen King

Source: Two Past Midnight: Secret Window, Secret Garden

“May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.”

Stephen King

Source: Wolves of the Calla

“We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

Variant: We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.
Source: The Green Mile (1996)

“You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It (1986)

“For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying… but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It

“You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.”

Stephen King book Doctor Sleep

Source: Doctor Sleep

“There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

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

Stephen King book Cujo

Source: Cujo

“Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

“It's best to be ruthless with the past.”

Stephen King book Rose Madder

Source: Rose Madder

“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.”

Stephen King book Needful Things

Source: Needful Things

“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

“Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

“Ka was like a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

Source: The Waste Lands

“I don’t want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead)…”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Be true, be brave, stand
All the rest is darkness.”

Stephen King

“Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

Source: The Drawing of the Three

“Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When you own a piano, it's harder to think about moving.”

Stephen King book Misery

Source: Misery

“Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

Variant: Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.
Source: The Green Mile

“Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

“Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.”

Stephen King

Page 457.
Everything's Eventual (2002), "Luckey Quarter"

“He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.”

Stephen King The Running Man

Source: The Running Man

“Dead was the gift that kept on giving. Dead, like
diamonds, was forever.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah

Source: Song of Susannah

“But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! 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.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

“I'll see you.'
He grinned. 'Not if i see you first.”

Stephen King book The Body

Source: The Body

“I'm not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what waswith me. What I was lacking.”

Stephen King book Joyland

Source: Joyland

“I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.”

Stephen King book The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Source: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

“When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“There will be water if God wills it.”

Stephen King

“Small children are great accepters. They don’t understand shame, or the need to hide things.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining

“Things do happen for a reason, but do we like the reason? Rarely.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“I think reality 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.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

“Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

Source: The Waste Lands

“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When Stephen King elaborated on his inspirations for his novel "Carrie" he draws from a time when he was a young man, and describes his impression when he came upon a statue of Christ on the cross, hanging there in misery, and he thought”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.”

Stephen King

“The crazy people of the world… shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“Ka works and the world moves on.”

Stephen King

Source: Wolves of the Calla

“If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival