Quotes from Stephen King

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.

most of what bein human's about is making choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don't give a person leave to just walk away from em... In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price.

But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered.

Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.

He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.

You don't worry about dropping the eggs until you're almost home.

It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, Here you are. Try not to lose it. But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.

Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,' it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the proch steps after her. 'The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women...rape all the men...and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!

he never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.

When a codependent is drowning, somebody else's life flashes before his eyes.

The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that's gone before. Because when katet breaks, the end always comes quickly. Say sorry.

What you don't know, you can't tell. Or made to tell.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. There is joy and also pain but the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Pretty-plain, loony-sane The ways of the world all will change and all the ways remain the same but if you're mad or only sane the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. We walk in love but fly in chains And the planes in Spain fall mainly in the rain.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head, they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things.

No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver, he thought. The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

I don't believe that there's anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that's all. What's been tried once had been tried once before...and before...and before.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-the-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: 'The editor is always right.' The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection.

There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Wear it home, it'll look like a dress.

That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

Strap it on whenever it's possible.

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.