Stephen king quotes

The past is obdurate.

Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

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.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

The truth is in the details.

No matter how many times you shake it the last drop always ends up in your pants

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.

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

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

Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.

When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

She felt like someone who drowns remembering what it was like to still be on the boat, so calm and at ease, so carelessly safe

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

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.

FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying

Life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.

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

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

If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?

They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

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

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

The most important things are the hardest to say

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.

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

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

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

You can't polish a turd.

My view is that organized religion is a very dangerous tool that's been misused by a lot of people.

Don't give me what I ask for, give me what I need.

But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.

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

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.

where the world ends is where you must begin

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today.

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.

I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love;I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the cost of these connections is horribly, outrageously high... and I still believe that the value received far outweighs the price which must be paid. (From introductory notes.)

Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.

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

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

You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

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

A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.

People can be stunningly unobservant.

Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

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

Love isn't soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

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.

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

Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

Do it for joy and you can do it forever

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

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

A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.

When all else fails, give up and go to the library.

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.

If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

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

I write to find out what I think.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.

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

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.

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

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

The brain is a muscle that can move the world.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

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

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.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

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

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

When facts speak, the wise man listens.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

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

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

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

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

The devil's voice is sweet to hear.

The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

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.

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

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 successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

Above all else, be consistent.

there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.

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

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.

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.'

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.

In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.

I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.

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

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.

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.

God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often

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.

All you need to do is hold on tight...and believe.

What is writing? Writing is telepathy.

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

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

If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.

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.

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.

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

In the year 2025, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives. . . .