Authors — Quotes

Stephen King Quotes: 127

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Different Seasons
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.
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.
Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
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.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Skeleton Crew
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.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
The Stand
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
Bag of Bones
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
The Green Mile
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
When asked, "How do you write?"I invariably answer, "One word at a time,"and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.
Doctor Sleep
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.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.
The Stand
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows
We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.
11/22/63
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
Wolves of the Calla
She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.
Under the Dome
Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.
Duma Key
You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.
Night Shift
Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..
It
Am I weird?" "Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird.
Different Seasons
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Sometimes dead is better
Pet Sematary
To write is human, to edit is divine.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.
The Dark Tower
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
Christine
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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 trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
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
The Stand
love is what moves the world, I've always thought...it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down...bring them low...and make them crawl...
For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.
Bag of Bones
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....
The Drawing of the Three
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
The Shining
If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?
I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something
I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
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.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
Lisey's Story
I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read."This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.
He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
The Dark Tower
Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.
We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
Duma Key
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
The Stand
I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
Bag of Bones
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.
Bag of Bones
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.
Full Dark, No Stars
They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?
The Long Walk
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
The Stand
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
you must not come lightly to the blank page.
I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.
Wolves of the Calla
Without story books is like a person with no soul.
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.
The Gunslinger
I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.
Joyland
All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand Constant Reader and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.
Full Dark, No Stars
When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
The monster nevers dies.
Cujo
You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.
The Dark Half
I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.
Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.
The Gunslinger
We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.
The Green Mile
Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.
Hearts in Atlantis
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
Danse Macabre
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
Rose Madder
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.
Different Seasons
I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.
Bag of Bones
Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?
The Gunslinger
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?
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.
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.
The Stand
You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand."He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?
Desperation
He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.
The Gunslinger
Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
The Waste Lands
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.
The Gunslinger
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.
Misery
It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.
The Stand
It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.
Full Dark, No Stars
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.
Full Dark, No Stars
But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.
The Gunslinger
But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty."McVries's voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. "It isn’t man or God. It’s something...in the brain.
The Long Walk
It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.
Everybody trusts a guy in a raincoat. I don't know why. It's just one of those mystery facts.
Just After Sunset
Free at last, he thought. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good, indeed.
The Dark Tower
Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.
Doctor Sleep
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
Doctor Sleep