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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

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

Stephen King book Danse Macabre

Source: Danse Macabre

“Adults are the real monsters.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It

“Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.”

Stephen King book The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

Source: The Waste Lands

“Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”

Stephen King book Firestarter

Source: Firestarter

“And then the world exploded.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

“I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.”

Stephen King book Rage

Source: Rage

“They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life. Pity was not love, Barbie reflected… but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.”

Stephen King book Duma Key

Source: Duma Key

“What Jack didn't understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

“I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

Stephen King

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

“Hearts are tough, Most times they don't break. Most times they are only bend”

Stephen King book Hearts in Atlantis

Source: Hearts in Atlantis

“You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

“My father had taught me - mostly by example - that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”

Stephen King book Joyland

Source: Joyland

“I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.”

Stephen King book Misery

Source: Misery

“When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married.”

Stephen King book The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Source: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

“Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining

“Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.”

Stephen King

Source: The Wind Through the Keyhole

“Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“They say The Pacific has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”

Stephen King

Source: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons

“Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

“The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.”

Stephen King

“I'm not making an enemy; I'm keepin' one.”

Stephen King book Dolores Claiborne

Source: Dolores Claiborne

“It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.”

Stephen King

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“sometimes an accident can be an unhappy womans best friend”

Stephen King

“FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying”

Stephen King book Doctor Sleep

Variant: FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.
Source: Doctor Sleep

“Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.”

Stephen King Insomnia

Source: Insomnia

“Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“no one dies happy, you can only die well”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

“Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

Stephen King book 11/22/63

Source: 11/22/63

“I know that the thing under my bed doesn't exist. But I also know that if I keep my feet under the blanket, it won't grab my ankle”

Stephen King

“It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?”

Stephen King

“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.”

Stephen King

Source: La Milla Verde

“She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn't care which, she wad overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can't help it. It's the way they're built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”

Stephen King book Revival

Source: Revival

“You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.”

Stephen King Dreamcatcher

Source: Dreamcatcher

“If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.”

Stephen King book Under the Dome

Source: Under the Dome

“There’s always a choice. That’s God’s way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There’s no set of leg-irons on you. But… this is what God wants of you.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

“There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”

Stephen King book Skeleton Crew

Source: Skeleton Crew

“The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.”

Stephen King book Lisey's Story

Source: Lisey's Story