Stephen King, born on September 21, 1947, is an iconic American author renowned for his prolific contributions to horror, supernatural fiction, and suspense genres. With over 350 million copies of his books sold worldwide, King’s impact on contemporary literature is immense. Notable works include “Carrie,” “The Shining,” “It,” and “The Stand.” His writing style features vivid characters and intricate plots, often exploring psychological horror. The Dark Tower series blends fantasy, science fiction, and Western elements. Many of King’s works have been adapted into successful films and series. Recognized for his storytelling prowess, King continues to be a prominent and influential figure in the literary world, leaving an indelible mark on the horror genre.
Stephen King Quotes
1. “Do it for joy and you can do it forever.”
— Stephen King
2. “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
— Stephen King
3. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
— Stephen King
4. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
— Stephen King
5. “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
— Stephen King
6. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
— Stephen King
7. “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
— Stephen King
8. “Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.”
— Stephen King
9. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
— Stephen King
10. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
— Stephen King
11. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
— Stephen King
12. “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”
— Stephen King
13. “Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
— Stephen King
14. “There’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”
— Stephen King
15. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King
16. “Above all else, be consistent.”
— Stephen King
17. “A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
— Stephen King
18. “Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
— Stephen King
19. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
— Stephen King
20. “Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter. ”
— Stephen King
21. “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”
— Stephen King
22. “You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.”
— Stephen King
23. “When the time is gone, you can never get it back.”
— Stephen King
24. “Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair.”
— Stephen King
25. “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
— Stephen King
26. “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
— Stephen King
27. “Time heals all wounds.”
— Stephen King
28. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
— Stephen King
29. “The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.”
— Stephen King
30. “Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.”
— Stephen King
31. “The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”
— Stephen King
32. “To write is human, to edit is divine.”
— Stephen King
33. “The most important things are the hardest to say.”
— Stephen King
34. “Be true, be brave, stand All the rest is darkness.”
— Stephen King
35. “When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”
— Stephen King
36. “When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’”
— Stephen King
37. “It’s a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”
— Stephen King
38. “If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”
— Stephen King
39. “The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.”
— Stephen King
40. “Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.”
— Stephen King
41. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
— Stephen King
42. “Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.”
— Stephen King
43. “Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”
— Stephen King
44. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
— Stephen King
45. “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.”
— Stephen King
46. “Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.”
— Stephen King
47. “I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.”
— Stephen King
48. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
— Stephen King
49. “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
— Stephen King
50. “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
— Stephen King
51. “No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”
— Stephen King
52. “A change is as good as a rest.”
— Stephen King
53. “Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
— Stephen King
54. “The monster nevers dies.”
— Stephen King
55. “The scholar’s greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.”
— Stephen King
56. “JK Rowling created seven Horcruxes. She put a part of her soul in every book and now her books will live forever.”
— Stephen King
57. “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.”
— Stephen King
58. “I write to find out what I think.”
— Stephen King
59. “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”
— Stephen King
60. “Only God gets things right the first time.”
— Stephen King
61. “Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”
— Stephen King
62. “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
— Stephen King
63. “It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
— Stephen King
64. “When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
— Stephen King
65. “Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.”
— Stephen King
66. “Time and tide wait for no man.”
— Stephen King
67. “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
— Stephen King
68. “I work until beer o’clock.”
— Stephen King
69. “Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It’s better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.”
— Stephen King
70. “Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.”
— Stephen King
71. “When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.”
— Stephen King
72. “A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.”
— Stephen King
73. “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
— Stephen King
74. “The turtle couldn’t help us.”
— Stephen King
75. “Talent is never static. It’s always growing or dying.”
— Stephen King
76. “A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.”
— Stephen King
77. “A short story is like a kiss in the dark.”
— Stephen King
78. “Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”
— Stephen King
79. “Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”
— Stephen King
80. “If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.”
— Stephen King
81. “Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”
— Stephen King
82. “I think that we’re all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better after all.”
— Stephen King
83. “The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”
— Stephen King
84. “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”
— Stephen King
85. “Don’t let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.”
— Stephen King
86. “Alone. Yes, that’s the keyword, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
— Stephen King
87. “As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?”
— Stephen King
88. “Long days and pleasant nights.”
— Stephen King
89. “It’s a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.”
— Stephen King
90. “The thought process can never be complete without articulation.”
— Stephen King
91. “People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”
— Stephen King
92. “In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”
— Stephen King
93. “I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It’s you I’m not entirely sure of.”
— Stephen King
94. “Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.”
— Stephen King
95. “A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
— Stephen King
96. “I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.”
— Stephen King
97. “There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.”
— Stephen King
98. “First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead.”
— Stephen King
99. “You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.”
— Stephen King
100. “If you want to play, you gotta pay.”
— Stephen King
101. “You should never trust a person who prays in public.”
— Stephen King
102. “Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.”
— Stephen King
103. “The past is obdurate.”
— Stephen King
104. “Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.”
— Stephen King
105. “Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”
— Stephen King
106. “People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”
— Stephen King
107. “A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless.”
— Stephen King
108. “By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
— Stephen King
109. “Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward life with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”
— Stephen King
110. “What is writing? Writing is telepathy.”
— Stephen King
111. “Don’t ask me silly questions I won’t play silly games I’m just a simple choo choo train And I’ll always be the same. I only want to race along Beneath the bright blue sky And be a happy choo choo train Until the day I die.”
— Stephen King
112. “If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?”
— Stephen King
113. “Sometimes dead is better.”
— Stephen King
114. “We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
— Stephen King
115. “Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.”
— Stephen King
116. “Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
— Stephen King
117. “We’re all going to die; I’m just trying to make it a little more interesting.”
— Stephen King
118. “A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.”
— Stephen King
119. “We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”
— Stephen King
120. “Love isn’t soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.”
— Stephen King
121. “The truth is in the details.”
— Stephen King
122. “I do not kill with my gun; He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.”
— Stephen King
123. “We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
— Stephen King
124. “The unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.”
— Stephen King
125. “We all float down here!”
— Stephen King
126. “Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”
— Stephen King
127. “There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.”
— Stephen King
128. “Some things were better lost than found.”
— Stephen King
129. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”
— Stephen King
130. “Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.”
— Stephen King
131. “Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.”
— Stephen King
132. “You can’t polish a turd.”
— Stephen King
133. “Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.”
— Stephen King
134. “True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
— Stephen King
135. “Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”
— Stephen King
136. “I have two amazing things in my life: I’m pain-free and I’m debt-free.”
— Stephen King
137. “A coward judges all he sees by what he is.”
— Stephen King
138. “The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.”
— Stephen King
139. “But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.”
— Stephen King
140. “Fear is the emotion that makes us blind.”
— Stephen King
141. “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.”
— Stephen King
142. “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”
— Stephen King
143. “We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.”
— Stephen King
144. “A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.”
— Stephen King
145. “FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying.”
— Stephen King
146. “It’s best to be ruthless with the past.”
— Stephen King
147. “And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.”
— Stephen King
148. “Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”
— Stephen King
149. “Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux.”
— Stephen King
150. “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
— Stephen King
151. “We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.”
— Stephen King
152. “Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it.”
— Stephen King
153. “If it’s ka it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.”
— Stephen King
154. “Just remember that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”
— Stephen King
155. “I am your number one fan.”
— Stephen King
156. “A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today.”
— Stephen King
157. “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
— Stephen King
158. “It’s alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.”
— Stephen King
159. “I’d like to learn French well enough to write in that language.”
— Stephen King
160. “I’m convinced that FEAR is at the root, of all bad writing.”
— Stephen King
161. “Time’s the thief of memory.”
— Stephen King
162. “It’s a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it’s a lot. Sometimes, it’s everything you have.”
— Stephen King
163. “But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”
— Stephen King
164. “The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”
— Stephen King
165. “It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.”
— Stephen King
166. “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
— Stephen King
167. “I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.”
— Stephen King
168. “There will be water if God wills it.”
— Stephen King
169. “Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
— Stephen King
170. “A person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.”
— Stephen King
171. “The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”
— Stephen King
172. “We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.”
— Stephen King
173. “Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?”
— Stephen King
174. “Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object – whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one – is something more we must carry on our backs.”
— Stephen King
175. “No matter how many times you shake it the last drop always ends up in your pants.”
— Stephen King
176. “City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.”
— Stephen King
177. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 – Jesus, did you?”
— Stephen King
178. “Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.”
— Stephen King
179. “Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.”
— Stephen King
180. “Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.”
— Stephen King
181. “The devil’s voice is sweet to hear.”
— Stephen King
182. “Busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.”
— Stephen King
183. “Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”
— Stephen King
184. “Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”
— Stephen King
185. “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as ‘good’ and other sorts as ‘bad’ is fearful behavior.”
— Stephen King
186. “I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book – something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.”
— Stephen King
187. “Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.”
— Stephen King
188. “Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.”
— Stephen King
189. “You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.”
— Stephen King
190. “Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”
— Stephen King
191. “French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”
— Stephen King
192. “A writer’s notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.”
— Stephen King
193. “No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
— Stephen King
194. “It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.”
— Stephen King
195. “Pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.”
— Stephen King
196. “I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.”
— Stephen King
197. “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.”
— Stephen King
198. “Life turns on a dime.”
— Stephen King
199. “The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”
— Stephen King
200. “You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”
— Stephen King
