Stephen King Quotes

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“The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.”

“and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.”

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”

“I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”

“Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.”

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

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

“But people love a hypocrite, you know——they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn't you.”

“May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!”

“It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have.”

“It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.”

“If you want to play, you gotta pay.”

“Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.”

“Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.”

“Grammar is… the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”

“In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.”

“Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools…for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.”

“The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well. I do not know where it finally fetched up, if it ever did; perhaps it reached the sea and sails there forever like a magic boat in a fairytale. All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed the incorporated town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever.”

“Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.”

“Sometimes, Delores, you have to be a high riding bitch in order to survive, because being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to..”

“The darkness. Goddamn the darkness. It seemed to Garraty they had been buried alive in it. Immured in it. Dawn was a century away. Many of them would never see the dawn. Or the sun. They were buried six feet deep in the darkness. All they needed was the monotonous chanting of the priest, his voice muffled but not entirely obscured by the new-packed darkness, above which the mourners stood. The mourners were not even aware that they were here, they were alive, they were screaming and scratching and clawing at the coffin-lid darkness, the air was flaking and rusting away, the air was turning into poison gas, hope fading until hope itself was darkness, and above all of it the nodding chapel-bell voice of the priest and the impatient, shuffling feet of mourners anxious to be off into the warm May sunshine. Then, overmastering that, the sighing, shuffling chorus of the bugs and the beetles, squirming their way through the earth, come for the feast…I could go crazy, Garraty thought. I could go right the fuck off my rocker.”

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

“That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“If I know anything, I know scary. And giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying. Thankfully, this national nightmare is one we can end.”

“I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson.”

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

“Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.”

“Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.”

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”

“She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.”

“We all float down here!”

“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”

“You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.”

“If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.”

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”

“Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair”

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”

“If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.”

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

“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead”

“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen”

“When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

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