J.E. > J.E.'s Quotes

“if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“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

“And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.”
― Lord Byron

“Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane”
― Emily Dickinson

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain

“Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never escaped from it.”
― Schiller, Friedrich

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― Cecil Day Lewis

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.”
― C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

“We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King

“[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”
― Mark Twain

“Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.”
― Anne Sexton

“Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, rather...that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor acount with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour.”
― Charles Dickens

“Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid. ”
― Dean Koontz

“And yet I am convinced that man will never give up true suffering- that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole root of consciousness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“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.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
― Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

“Thus terminating the interview, during which both ladies had trembled very much, and been marvellously polite--certain indications that they were within an inch of a very desperate quarrel...”
― Charles Dickens

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

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

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus, Book I

“Change isn't easy... changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That's hard... When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.”
― Dean Koontz

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost