Stephen King

Novelist

1947-09-21

American novelist and short-story writer known for horror, suspense, and supernatural fiction. His notable works include Carrie, The Shining, It, and The Stand. He has also written nonfiction on writing and his literary career.

Quotes by Stephen King

I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don't we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
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Get busy living or get busy dying.—― Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption
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Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found.
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It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
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She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours.
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A man who doubts himself shouldn't have to try too hard for too long, not until he's seasoned.
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Don't think I know you, Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry's hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can't afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can't afford the zoo, go see a politician.
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A person can't change all at once.
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Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
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Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.
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We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.
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The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed
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It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut— it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
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Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
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The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
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...and still the hands did their trick, like over-eager dogs that want to do their rolling— over trick for you not once or twice but all night.
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A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.
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Fiction is the truth inside a lie.
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I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.
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If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one–probably a child–who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.
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