Quotes from Stephen King

Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid's lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.

Hello, Not-There," Piper said. Not-There was her private name for God just lately. Earlier in the fall it had been The Great Maybe. During the summer, it had been The Omnipotent Could-Be.

Too much knowledge isn't good for a person. I know that now.

Because, if given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself. Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.

His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

but shame is like laughter. And inspiration. It doesn't knock.

The dead do not see, unless they look from a brighter place than this darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much  . . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane.

Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted in soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it's there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.

the world is so empty and so loveless when there's no one in it to holler your name and holler you home.

I pointed at Wireman's forehead. This is your brain, I said. Then I pointed at my easel. This is your brain on canvas.

Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?

People assume any twentieth-century white male writer must be an alcoholic.

They said the stock market crashed, or something, but since I'm deaf I didn't hear it (ha-ha).

That had to be the answer. When you heard hoofbeats, you didn't think zebras.

And that almost killed you? It wasn't deep but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.

Even after a thousand pages we don't want to leave the world the writer has made for us, or the make-believe people who live there.

Never before in his life had he understood how subjective, how plastic, time really is.

There's a door in the wall. The door is covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits.

Pon distancia y trata de mantener la sonrisa. Sintoniza un rock and roll en la radio y ve hacia toda la vida que existe con todo el valor que puedas reunir y toda la fe que logres invocar. Sé leal, sé valiente, aguanta. El resto es oscuridad.

But nothin lasts, I guess. Only the love of the Lord.

Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world… Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.