"Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?"
— Stephen King

"If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.
This is how we go on."
— Stephen King

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

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

"Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing."
— Stephen King

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

"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)

"It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis."
— Stephen King

"There are things of such darkness and horror-just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty - that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception."
— Stephen King

""Nobody likes a clown at midnight""
— Stephen King

"As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along."
— Stephen King

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple."
— Dr. Seuss

"God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"We're here to fuck shit up"
— Stephen King

"I write to find out what I think."
— Stephen King

"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 "
— Stephen King

"Friends.
They aren’t any such thing as good friend or bad friend.
Maybe there are just friend.
People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely.
Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for.
Maybe worth dying for too.
If that what has to be.
No bad friends.
Only people you want.
Need to be with.
People who build their houses in your heart."
— Stephen King

"When it comes to the past, we all stack the deck."
— Wireman from Stephen King's Duma Key

"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"
— Stephen King

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

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

"I have the heart of a small boy...and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
— Stephen King

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

"In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts."
— Stephen King (It)

"He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!"
— Stephen King (Needful Things)

"As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer."
— Stephen King (Desperation)

"Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face."
— Stephen King (Gerald's Game)

"So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little."
— Stephen King (Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass)

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."
— Stephen King

"Invitation to Dance-
It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.
But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.
May I have the pleasure?"
— Stephen King

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

"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. "
— Stephen King

"Without story books is like a person with no soul."
— Stephen King

"no knowledge obtained without risk"
— Stephen King

"sometimes an accident can be an unhappy womans best friend "
— Stephen King

"When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story."
— Stephen King

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
— Stephen King

"Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end."
— Stephen King

"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."
— Stephen King

"Do it for joy and you can do it forever"
— Stephen King

""Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has to hold on to."
"
— ~Stephen King's Delores

"High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up."
— Stephen King

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

"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."
— Stephen King

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
— Stephen King

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

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (what ever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head."
— Stephen King

"Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly."
— Stephen King

"If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered."
— Stephen King