Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
“Relief loosens tongues beyond measure.”
“She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.”
“If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?”
“Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. "I think this is it.”
“Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.”
“Each life makes its own imitation of immortality.”
“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
“Art should be a place of hope.”
“Don't let the door hitcha where the good Lord splitcha.”
“Let this ground be seeded with salt, so that no stalk of corn, or stalk of wheat shall ever grow. Cursed be the children of this ground, and cursed be their loins. Also cursed be their hams and hocks. Hail Marry full of grace, let us blow this goddamn place.”
“Wear it home. It'll look like a dress.”
“Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heard clearly in the dreams of later years.”
“...it was more like bleeding than crying.”
“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.”
“The cult of celebrity is cogitative shit running through the bowel of the intellect.”
“You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.”
“Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.”
“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”
“It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.”
“Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.”
“Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.”
“His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.”
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
“I think you're a taker. You've always been one. It's like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me.”
“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
“It’s better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a tremendous cost.”
“Una vida sin libros es una vida sedienta, y una sin poesía es como una vida sin cuadros.”
“Nope, nothing wrong here.”
“When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there. The additives. The impurities. It sure feels good. It's a whole body, whole-minded enema.”
“You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.”
“As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.”
“Grammar is...the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”
“Two babbies shagging each other like they were the first two on earth to discover how 'twas done.”
“They were drugged, stone in love. To them every scar on the face of the world was a beauty mark.”
“It's a poorboy sanditch,' Roland said. 'With lots of mayo, whatever that is. I'd want a sauce that didn't look quite so much like come, myself, but may it do ya fine.”
“Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”
“In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.”
“I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.”
“Kindle, isn’t it?” the waitress asked. “I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I’m reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult’s books.” “Oh, probably not all of them,” Wesley said. “Huh? Why not?” “She’s probably got another one done already. That’s all I meant.” “And James Patterson’s probably written one since he got up this morning!” she said, and went off chortling.”
“A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…”
“May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.”
“Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember.”
“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.”
“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”
“But listen to me, all three of you, n hear this if you don't hear nothing else: everything I did, I did for love . . . the love a natural mother feels for her children. That's the strongest love there is in the world, and it's the deadliest. There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
“Disquiet and desire. What you want and what you're scared to try for. Where you've been and where you want to go. Something in a rock-and-roll song about wanting the girl, the car, the place to stand and be. Oh please God can you dig it.”
“once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual”
“Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.”
“Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or leaving closed.”
“Just go on dancing with me like this forever and I'll never tire. We'll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”