Stephen King Quotations | Page 3

Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing.

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

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.

I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

I tend to scare myself.

Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.

Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But at the same time there's a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, well, if this is God's plan, it's very peculiar. And you have to wonder about that guy's personality, the big guy's personality.

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

Time is a keyhole.... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.

I like to always stop with a couple of pages that I haven't - that are just raw copy, where I haven't touched it, I haven't tried to revise it, I haven't tried to polish it. It's like having a little bit of a runway. The next day when you sit down, you have the comfort of saying, well, I have got a little bit here, used to be in the typewriter. Now it's in the magic box, the computer.

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

If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

I don't like the idea that I am going to come back as an ant or a sparrow if I don't get along in the great karma of life.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.

So where do the ideas-the salable ideas-come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious.

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

Talent is never static. It's always growing or dying.

Cold start is a hard start.

Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.

Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

We don't know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.

She didn't see him at first. She was watching the dancers. Her color was high, and there were deep dimples at the corners of her mouth. She looked nine miles out of place, but he had never loved her more. This was Willa on the edge of a smile.

I think what you do is, you keep your sensors open. And it's - the more that you do the job, the more you come to understand in a kind of intuitive way that you're always - you know, your radar is on. And the thing is going around and around and around. And it's not picking up any blips.

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.

If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

What really scares me is Alzheimer's or premature senility, losing that ability to read and enjoy and to write. And you do it, and some days maybe aren't so good, and then some days, you really catch a wave, and it's as good as it ever was.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

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

I go where the story leads. And, sometimes, it is a little bit outrageous. And I relish that. I sort of want to be as much on the edge as I can.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory. She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace.

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.

The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.

Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

You have to go where the book leads you.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

The bad ideas kind of just drop out of the mix. You forget about them. The good ones stick around.

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

I want to engage the reader. I'm an emotional writer, in the sense that I would be happy if you re-read a book for the intellectual or the mental part of it, but, the first time, I just like to reach out and grab you, pull you in.

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

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

The dream didn't fade as dreams usually do upon waking.

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.

In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.

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.

See the BEAR of fearsome size! All the WORLD'S within his eyes. TIME grows thin, the past is a riddle; The TOWER awaits you in the middle.

Long days and pleasant nights

Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found.

We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.

The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Because things like this you can only ssay once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again.

I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.

If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone

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?

It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)

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.

The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.

If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.

This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.

In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.

The wife whose sweetly given reply in the face of any problem would be, "Whatever you think is best, dear." Women, take note: a wife like that never needs to fear bubbling away the last of her life through a cut throat.

He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. Its just how the world is.

For," I said, "a murdered man or woman dies not in God's time, but in Man's. He... or she... is cut short before he... or she... can atone for sin, and so all errors must be forgiven. When you think of it that way, all murderers are a gateway for heaven.

I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter - eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low - pressure time - that's one of the things I love about it),...

The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. (viii)

I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing… I can always get a J. Crew catalogue… …So spare me, if you please, the hero’s ‘sharply intelligent blue eyes’ and ‘outthrust determined chin’.

About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.