Quotes from Stephen King

That ain't Chanel Number Five I smell comin from the direction of your butt, is it?

I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book.

Dreams on waking were like empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems.

I'd read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world's strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: 'He had lost the habit of romance.

The sun loses it's thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world--

The world eventually sends out a mean-ass Patrol Boy to slow your progress and show you who's boss. You reading this have undoubtedly met yours (or will); I met mine, and I'm sure he'll be back. He's got my address. He's a mean guy, a Bad Lieutenant, the sworn enemy of goofery, fuckery, pride, ambition, loud music, and all things nineteen.

Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I'd ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn't much of an adventure.

Sometimes the most horrible things are what give us strength.

if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly you.

When you planned rough, you allowed room for improvisation.

I love you, Beverly . . . just let me have that. You can have Bill, or the world, or whatever you need. Just let me have that, let me go on loving you, and I guess it'll be enough.

He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.

There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.

I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.

The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.

Thunderheads were pouring toward them through the ragged teeth of the White Mountains, and Lisey counted seven dark spots where the high slopes had been smudged away by cauls of rain. Brilliant lightnings flashed inside those stormbags and between those two of them, connecting them like some fantastic fairy bridge, was a double rainbow that arched over Mount Cranmore in a frayed loophole of blue.

but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

That slit was the object of every man's lust - the heterosexual ones, at least - but it was frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn, distrust, and hate. You didn't hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What's a woman? A life-support system for a cunt .

He had no psychic powers, but there was one power he did have: he was the grownup. The adult.

God says, Sure, take away the safety net. And when that's gone, take away the tight rope too.

When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.

You fucking drunken waste god wiped snot out of his nose and that was you