Quotes from Stephen King

false enthusiasm does not come easily to six-year-olds … although, sad to say, it's a skill most of us learn fairly rapidly.

His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine.. He didn't sound illiterate, but he didn't sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me - a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.

Aye. Would'ee speak a word of prayer first, Roland? To whatever God thee holds?" "I hold to no God," Roland said. "I hold to the Tower, and won't pray to that.

The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God's gunslinger.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common

You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…the bread and wine…the confessional…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes.

A man's mouth gets him in more trouble than his pecker ever could, most of the time.

Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one.

The lessons that are remembered the longest, Roland knew, are always the ones that are self-taught.

I'll do whatever you want," Trash said gratefully in the dream. "My life for you! My soul for you!" "I will set you to burn," the dark man said gravely.

Why would she do that? Because she's a Yankee - a Maine Yankee, the worst kind. On a given day, they can make the Irish look logical.

I don't want to think too much about art, you see. I don't want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties ... What I want to do is clutch my heart and fall down when I see it. (Mr. Nannuzzi to Edgar)

Law enforcement: a case of good men doing bad chores.

There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don't understand is because you're not one of those people. You'd use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that's what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You're just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you'd go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn't be able to help yourself.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes—maybe even often—it's the solution.

Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.

Pete said she didn't like to read, and he could never get tight with a girl who didn't like books.

His words faded, because here were the switches Dan was looking for. The special switches, the ones with the red handles ... Shine on, he thought, and pulled them all.

When traitors are called heroes (or heroes traitors, he supposed in his frowning way), dark times must have fallen.

She remembered Scott saying that people shouldn't be allowed houses with more than two toilets to shit in, it gives them delusions of grandeur.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone.

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There's someone who knows." Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Most kids don't give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can't play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody's fifth wheel.