Quotes By Stephen King

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.

Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

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.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

The devil's voice is sweet to hear.

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.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.