65 Stephen King Quotes On Writing, Love, Life, Success
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published 61 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. These Stephen King quotes will motivate you.
Best Stephen King Quotes
- “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” ~ Stephen King
- “When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, ‘Why god? Why me?’ and the thundering voice of God answered, ‘There’s just something about you that pisses me off.'” ~ Stephen King
- “The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.” ~ Stephen King
- “Fear can hold you, prisoner. Hope can set you free.” ~ Stephen King
- “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ~ Stephen King
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“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.” ~ Stephen King
- “In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.” ~ Stephen King
- “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” ~ Stephen King
- “But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. […] True sorrow is as rare as true love.” ~ Stephen King
- “No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.” ~ Stephen King
- “Love isn’t soft like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.” ~ Stephen King , Stephen King quotes on love
- “Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.” ~ Stephen King
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“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” ~ Stephen King
- “Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” ~ Stephen King
- “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them.” ~ Stephen King
- “Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.” ~ Stephen King
- “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.” ~ Stephen King
- “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” ~ Stephen King , Stephen King quotes on writing
- “Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.” ~ Stephen King
- “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
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“The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.” ~ Stephen King
- “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.” ~ Stephen King
- “When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.” ~ Stephen King
- “It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.” ~ Stephen King , Stephen King quotes on life
- “The devil’s voice is sweet to hear.” ~ Stephen King
- “People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.” ~ Stephen King
- “The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.” ~ Stephen King
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“The brain is a muscle that can move the world.” ~ Stephen King
- “When all else fails, give up and go to the library.” ~ Stephen King
- “Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.” ~ Stephen King
- “I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.” ~ Stephen King
- “If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.” ~ Stephen King
- “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.” ~ Stephen King
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“You can’t polish a turd.” ~ Stephen King
- “Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.” ~ Stephen King
- “That was what I wanted, but I don’t need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.” ~ Stephen King
- “I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.” ~ Stephen King
- “There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.” ~ Stephen King
- “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
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“Don’t give me what I ask for, give me what I need.” ~ Stephen King
- “It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.” ~ Stephen King
- “What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.” ~ Stephen King
- “You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.” ~ Stephen King
- “Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.” ~ Stephen King
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“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” ~ Stephen King
- “Time is a keyhole… We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do–the wind that blows through the keyhole–is the breath of all the living universe.” ~ Stephen King
- “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 , Stephen King quotes on books
- “But I believe in love, you know; love is 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
- “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
- “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.” ~ Stephen King
- “Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.” ~ Stephen King
- “God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often” ~ Stephen King
- “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
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“We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.” ~ Stephen King
- “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” ~ Stephen King
- “If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.” ~ Stephen King
- “The dream might have been more than a dream. It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar… and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through.” ~ Stephen King
- “People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.” ~ Stephen King
- “I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.” ~ Stephen King
- “If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library.” ~ Stephen King
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“True sorrow is as rare as true love.” ~ Stephen King
- “You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.” ~ Stephen King
- “For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.” ~ Stephen King
- “Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?” ~ Stephen King
- “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.” ~ Stephen King
