Quotes from Stephen King

The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.

She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.

Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.

The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey.

When all the normal patterns and routines of a person's life fell apart—and with such shocking suddenness—you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable.

The wheel of ka turns and the world moves on.

Some days are treasure. Not many but I think in almost every life there are a few.

The boat dipped and swayed and sometimes took on water, but it did not sink; the two brothers had waterproofed it well. I do not know where it finally fetched up, if it ever did; perhaps it reached the sea and sails there forever, like a magic boat in a fairytale. All I know is that it was still afloat and still running on the breast of the flood when it passed te incorporated town limits of Derry, Maine, and there it passes out of this tale forever.

Hadn't somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness were the same thing?

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.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story  . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

It was strange how some of childhood's words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.

Is there hell, or do we make our own on earth?

But there was only that silence, as in the five or ten minutes before a vicious thundersquall strikes, when the purple heads stack up in the sky overhead and the light turns a queer purple-yellow and the wind dies completely.

Sometimes home is where the heart is, Eddie thought randomly. I believe that. Old Bobby Frost said home's the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Unfortunately, it's also the place where, once you're in there, they don't ever want to let you out.

Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.

There's an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.

Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seem limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

Like shit, change happens.

Relief loosens tongues beyond measure.