Stephen King quotes: cool content from one of the world’s most successful authors, Stephen Edwin King.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
“I work until beer o’clock.”
“I’ve said it before… and I’ll say it again: ‘When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing, whatever it is, until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head.'”
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
“The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.”
“You can’t deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.”
“We make up horrors to help us deal with the real ones.”
“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.”
“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position.”
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
“Well, I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. [In 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and left severely injured.] I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn’t work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that’s another book that shows the drugs at work.”
“Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.”
“Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
“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 more about this.'”
“I write to find out what I think.”
“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”
“The only mortal sin is giving up.”
“I do feel a little bit like Walt Disney’s evil twin! After all, I’m the guy who invented the clown that eats children.”
“There’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”
“Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on.”
“Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.”
“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”
“High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going, you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.”
“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
“Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”
“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 our entire life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.”
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
“Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
“I give because it’s the only concrete way I have of saying that I’m glad to be alive and that I can earn my daily bread doing what I love. Giving puts our focus back where it belongs: on the lives we lead, the families we raise, the communities that nurture us.”
“Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.”
“A coward judges all he sees by what he is.”
“I take a book almost everywhere. 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.”
“Time’s the thief of memory.”
“Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”
“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”
“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
“You’ve got a brain under the cap you’re wearing. Take care of the damned thing. Try to remember there’s more to life than Vin Diesel and Tom Cruise. It wouldn’t kill you to go to a movie once a month that has subtitles on the bottom of the screen. You can read them, you went to college, right?”
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
“Hug and kiss whoever helped get you – financially, mentally, morally, emotionally – to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you’re too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. 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.”
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; and sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
The end. Is it just me or do you want to shoot the sh*t with this guy over a couple of cold ones?
