Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Bill Hodges Trilogy, Revival, and Doctor Sleep. His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller as well as the Best Hardcover Book Award from the International Thriller Writers Association. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman’s got to hold on to.
That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Nobody likes a clown at midnight.
FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.
Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.
Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
I tend to scare myself.
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.
Sometimes dead is better
If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.
A coward judges all he sees by what he is.
A person can’t change all at once.
Do it for joy and you can do it forever
If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.
What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common….
I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.
The most important things are the hardest to say
You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.
Some things were better lost than found.
Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real.
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
Home is where they want you to stay longer.
It was like drowning, only from the inside out.
We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.
The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear
Words have weight.
Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.
If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.
It’s a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.
The mystery of the universe is not time but size.
Weird love’s better than no love at all.
The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.
A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.
Time heals all wounds.