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.
“If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone”
“Better to be a mouse behind the wainscoting, nibbling at the wires. Better to be a spider, high up under the eaves, spinning its web.”
“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”
“Looking back on it, Sloat wasn't sure how he had tolerated Phil Sawyer for as long as he had. His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes.”
“Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.”
“I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He's got all the spine of a dying jellyfish.”
“Can I? Yeah. You bet I can. There's a million things in this world can't do. Couldn't hit a curve ball, even back in high school. Can't fix a leaky faucet. Can't roller-skate or make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit. I have tried twice to be married and couldn't do it either time. But if you want me to take you away, to scare you or involve you or make you cry or grin, yeah. I can. I can bring it to you and keep bringing it until you holler uncle. I am able. I CAN.”
“Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?”
“What about reality, you ask? Well, as far as I'm concerned, reality can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
“Eat hearty”
“Purpurfargade ansiktet”
“You say true, I say thankya.”
“It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)”
“Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”
“Politics always change. Stories never do.”
“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
“Da-da chum da-da che, not to worry you've got the key!”
“There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.”
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.”
“The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.”
“It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
“I am in trouble here. This woman is not right.”
“and then woe is you, Pauly. Woe to the max.”
“For me, the imagination which so often kept me awake and in terror as a child has seen me through some terrible bouts of stark raving reality as an adult.”
“You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.”
“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”
“It had been no struggle to turn his face to the south and leave it behind — but it had hurt his heart.”
“The gunslinger turned his eyes up to the faces in the leaves. A play was being enacted there for his amusement Worlds rose and fell before him. Empires were built across shining sands where forever machines toiled in abstract electronic frenzies. Empires declined and fell. Wheels that had spun like silent liquid moved more slowly, began to squeak, began to scream, stopped. Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies full of stars like beds of cold jewels. And through it all, a dying wind of change blew, bringing with it the cinnamon smell of late October. The gunslinger watched as the world moved on.”
“Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.”
“by Annie Wilkes...If you can get into that chair all by yourself, Paul, she said at last, then I think you can fill in your f******* n's.She then closed the door and locked it again. Paul sat looking at it for a long time, almost as if there was something to see. He was too flabberghasted to do anything else.”
“You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.”
“To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude.”
“Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust... ”
“M-O-O-N Spells moon”
“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.”
“His kid brother had been smart enough to make something of himself in the big world; Ollie himself might have been smart enough to stay ahead of the bank loans and the credit cards, but not much more.”
“The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.”
“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.”
“For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.”
“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.”
“I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.”
“Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, "Write.”
“There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.”
“If you don't control your temper, your temper will control you.”
“HEY, BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP!”
“I was struck to my heart and through my heart, knocked clean out of my ordinary life.”
“where the world ends is where you must begin”
“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.”
“I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet." (from the short story Mrs. Todd's Shortcut)”
“The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.”