Top 1360 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen King - Page 21

Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair

If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.

If you want to play, you gotta pay.

At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.

The turtle couldn't help us.

There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

There’s always someone who knows something.

I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

Want a Coke?” Abra asked. “Sugar solves lots of problems, that’s what I think.

I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.

Everything in moderation. And that includes a couple of beers a day.

There are really very few economies of scale in centralising or standardising advertising.

and then woe is you, Pauly. Woe to the max.

It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.

Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.

I've spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I've seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

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

True love always happens in a flash.

You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy.

The mystery of the universe is not time but size.

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust.

It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.

You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.

Time is a face on the water.

Time heals all wounds.

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.

You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn’t question knowing.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.

You cant be too careful on a skateboard.

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.

I love music, and I can play a little. But anyone can see the difference between someone who's talented and someone that's not.

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.

Advertising tends to be most effective in jogging finally into action those people who are well-enough disposed towards a product, but have not yet got around to buying it.

It's dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters.

The only leverage the manufacturer can apply to the retailer is his relationship with the consumer. And the main element in profit growth is going to have to lie in making his brand more valuable to the retailer, through its being more valuable to the consumer. And that means his brand must be unique, it must have no adequate direct substitutes - because it is in this, after all, that value lies.

I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.

Showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don't want to do any of that.

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, "I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.

All Thing Serve the Beam

Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, "Write.

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.

Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

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.

A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together - a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life.

You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.

It was as hysterical as a woman having a hot flash.

What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the way I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, and this old man is all that's left.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

Some guys-a lot of guys-don't believe what they are seeing, especially if it gets in the way of what they want to eat or drink or believe. Me, I don't believe in God. But if i saw him, I would. I wouldn't just go around saying, "Jesus, that was a great special effect." The definition of an asshole is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.

Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.

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

If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the New York Yankees or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the differences between a gerund (verb form used as a noun) and a participle (verb form used as an adjective).