Stephen King Quotes

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”

“A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

“Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.”

“As a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

“Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.”

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.”

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”

“I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.”

“I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.”

“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”

“I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.”

“I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.”

“I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.”

“I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.”

“I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.”

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better ? and maybe not all that much better after all.”