Quotes by Stephen King

…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy.

And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside Its homicidal endless formless hungry being.

There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mothers life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. Id think This isnt the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then Id think Half the world has the same idea.

You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.

God makes it all come right in the end, thats what Johnnie told Dock Barker just before we parted company. I was raised a Christian-I admit I fell away a bit along my journey-and I believe that: were stuck with what we have, but thats all right; in Gods eyes, none of us are really much more than flies on strings and all that matters is how much sunshine you can spread along the way.

There’s no tonic like an old friend.

Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

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

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.

He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?

Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the authors ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.

When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.

The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didnt have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.

He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Those are the only to verbalizations usually that we make in movies—either to scream or to laugh—because those two reactions are rather close. Most things we laugh at are things that are really horrible, when you think about them. It’s funny and you don’t scream, as long as it’s not you. If it’s somebody else you can laugh.