Quotes from Stephen King

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

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

Oy? he asked. Will you say goodbye? Oy looked at Roland, and for a moment the gunslinger wasn't sure he understood. Then the bumbler extended his neck and caressed the boy's cheek a last time with his tongue. I, Ake, he said: Bye, Jake or I ache, it came to the same.

How cruel would a supreme being have to be to make a world as fucked-up as this one?

He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said, All right, we're back together again. What the hell do we do next?

I'm so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see.

As I said at the beginning, this is a horror story.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.

You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.

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.

The universe (he said) 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.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound; these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records floating down the broken shaft of memory. When I turn to you to ask if you remember, When I turn to you in our bed

there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.

Should you go on, you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked. What's behind it won't improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal Once upon a time. Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye.

The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.

God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you.

Life is too sweet to give up without a fight, don't you think?

There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.

That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. [ The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest , May/June 2009)]

Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it's like a law of nature.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.