Quotes By Stephen King

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

I've always believed in God. I also think that's the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you're in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."

And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.

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

This is not a bad life.

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.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

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

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

It's a mystery. That's the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it's mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.

We're news junkies in my house.

I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

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

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

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.

But 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 recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

Well, I'm like a drug addict, I'm always saying I'm going to stop, and then I don't, what I've said consistently is that I hope I know when to stop: when it starts to get repetitive.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

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.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.