Stephen King

“Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!”

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”

“Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.”

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

“Time and tide wait for no man.”

“Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.”

“He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands”

“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”

“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”

“Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.”

“He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.”

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”

“...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.”

“I don't have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.”

“Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.”

“The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”

“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”

“Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.”

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.”

“I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.”

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

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”

“A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, 'Why god? Why me?' and the thundering voice of God answered, 'There's just something about you that pisses me off.'”

“This is not a bad life.”

“I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.”

“In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.”

“I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.”

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

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

“Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question..”

“I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.”

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

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

“I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.”

“It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.”

“When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'”

“And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.”

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

“We're news junkies in my house.”

“I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.”

“Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.”

“Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.”

“We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”

“After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.”

“People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

“Words have weight.”

“That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.”

“No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”

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

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

“Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash.”

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

“I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.”

“The devil's voice is sweet to hear.”

“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”

“The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary”

“It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.”

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

“I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.”

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

“Time heals all wounds.”

“I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.”

“The monster nevers dies.”

“I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.”

“And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.”

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

“Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.”

“Sometimes dead is better”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

“You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.”

“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”

“You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.”

“Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.”

“But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”

“We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.”

“Viața nu e suport pentru artă. Invers stau lucrurile.”

“He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?”

“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.”

“And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.”

“Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.”

“You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”

“Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.”

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

“I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.”

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.”

“I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.”

“The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”

“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”

“Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.”

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.”

“I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.”

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

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, 'Why god? Why me?' and the thundering voice of God answered, 'There's just something about you that pisses me off.'”

“This is not a bad life.”

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

“He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die”

“Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.”

“I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.”

“In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.”

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

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

“I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.”

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

“I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.”

“It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.”

“When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'”

“And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.”

“You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.”

“If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.”

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”

“Why does she have to be such a...such a..."”

“We're news junkies in my house.”

“I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.”

“Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.”

“Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.”

“We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”

“After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.”

“Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.”

“People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

“That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.”

“No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”

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

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

“We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.”

“I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.”

“The devil's voice is sweet to hear.”

“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”

“Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.”

“Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired -not really tired- yet. But I will be." The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness "And I think... when I get tired enough... I think I'll just sit down”

“It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.”

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

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

“I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.”

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

“If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?”

“I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.”

“I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.”

“And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.”

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

“Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.”

“Am I weird?"”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”

“You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.”

“You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.”

“But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”

“We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.”

“He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?”

“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.”

“And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.”

“Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.”

“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.”

“You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”

“Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.”

“I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.”

“Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.”

“I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.”

“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?”

“And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.”

“The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.”

“Time's the thief of memory”

“Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.”

“You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.”

“A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”

“The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.”

“Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.”

“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”

“At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.”

“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.”

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”

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

“I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.”

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