Stephen King Quotes

“Playboy: Are you afraid of the dark? King: Of course. Isn’t everybody? Actually, I can’t understand my own family sometimes. I won’t sleep without a light on in the room and, needless to say, I’m very careful to see that the blankets are tucked tight under my legs so I won’t wake up in the middle of the night with a clammy hand clutching my ankle.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“Writing is necessary for my sanity. As a writer, I can externalize my fears and insecurities and night terrors on paper, which is what people pay shrinks a small fortune to do. In my case, they pay me for psychoanalyzing myself in print. And in the process, I’m able to “write myself sane,” as that fine poet Anne Sexton put it. It’s an old technique of therapists’, you know: Get the patient to write out his demons. A Freudian exorcism. But all the violent energies I have—and there are a lot of them—I can vomit out onto paper. All the rage and hate and frustration, all that’s dangerous and sick and foul within me, I’m able to spew into my work. There are guys in padded cells all around the world who aren’t so lucky.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“It Is the Tale, Not He Who Tells It.” That’s been a good guide to me in life, and I think it would make a good epitaph for my tombstone. Just that and no name.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“Those avatars of high culture hold it almost as an article of religious faith that plot and story must be subordinated to style, whereas my deeply held conviction is that story must be paramount, because it defines the entire work of fiction. All other considerations are secondary—theme, mood, even characterization and language itself.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“those people would all be dead even if I’d never written a word. The murderers would still have murdered. So I think we should resist the tendency to kill the messenger for the message. Evil is basically stupid and unimaginative and doesn’t need creative inspiration from me or anybody else.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“In Florida last year, there was a homosexual-murder case in which a famous nutritionist known as the Junk-Food Doctor was killed in a particularly grisly way, tortured and then slowly suffocated while the murderers sat around eating fast food and watching him die. Afterward, they scrawled the word redrum, or murder spelled backward, on the walls, and, of course, that’s a word I used in The Shining. Not only should the dumb bastards be fried or at least put away for life but they should be sued for plagiarism, too!”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview

“we’re still in the business of selling public executions.”
― Stephen King, Stephen King: The Playboy Interview