"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

"Get busy living or get busy dying."
— Stephen King (Shawshank Redemption)

"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."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay)

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
— Stephen King

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart."
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."
— Stephen King

"Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters."
— Stephen King (The Shining)

"Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."
— Stephen King

"Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."
— Stephen King (On Writing)

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."
— Stephen King (Different Seasons)

"We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness."
— Dean Koontz

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. "
— Joe Hill

"Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage."
— Joe Hill

"Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers."
— Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts)

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"I will go to my grave in a state of abject endless fascination that we all have the capacity to become emotionally involved with a personality that doesn't exist. "
— Berkeley Breathed

"Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out. "
— Berkeley Breathed

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"The 12-step chocolate program: NEVER BE MORE THAN 12 STEPS AWAY FROM CHOCOLATE!"
— Terry Moore

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
— David Foster Wallace

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."
— David Foster Wallace (Up, Simbal!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate)

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)