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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

“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It (1986), Ch. 16 : Eddie's Bad Break, §8
Context: Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

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

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

“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.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

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

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

“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.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

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

Stephen King book The Body

Source: The Body

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

Stephen King book The Long Walk

Source: The Long Walk

“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.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

Source: The Green Mile

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

Stephen King Storm of the Century

Source: Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay

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

Stephen King book The Body

Source: The Body

“If you want to play, you gotta pay.”

Stephen King book Duma Key

Source: Duma Key

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

Stephen King book Revival

Variant: Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.
Source: Revival

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

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

“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.”

Stephen King book It

It (1986)

“Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.”

Stephen King

“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..”

Stephen King book Dolores Claiborne

Dolores Claiborne (1992)

“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.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

“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.”

Stephen King

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

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

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

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

Stephen King book It

Source: It

“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.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“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.”

Stephen King

" My Book About A Really Mean Car That Kills People Was Pretty Scary. But Not As Scary As Those Scary Republicans http://bailey.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=244594", The Gaggle, Newsweek (24 October 2006)

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

Stephen King

As quoted in an edition of I Am Legend (1995)
Context: I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me.

“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.”

Stephen King

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

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

Stephen King

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

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“We all float down here!”

Stephen King book It

Pennywise
Source: It (1986)

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

Stephen King

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

Stephen King book Night Shift

Source: Night Shift

“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.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

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

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

“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.”

Stephen King

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

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“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”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

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

Stephen King

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