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.
“The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson's henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.Blasphemy," she told herself complacently. "The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”
“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”
“Because it's trouble, and it's in our road. We'll get there in time. No need to live in trouble until trouble comes.”
“Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers' money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.”
“Has it ever occurred to you," he said abruptly, "that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?"I shook my head.Tell you what I think," he said, "I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.”
“What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.”
“At Hartford or New Haven or one of those other places where no one in their right fucking mind would want to live.”
“They were close to the end of the beginning . . .”
“They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.”
“Time's the thief of memory”
“Once again there was the desert, and that only.”
“Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.”
“the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”
“There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.”
“The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go”
“The trap had a ghastly perfection”
“I don’t want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead)…”
“When machines fail, when technology fails, when the conventional religion fails, people have got to have something. Even a zombin lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assult of a million flurocarbon spray cans of deoderant." - The Mist”
“There are thousands of talented writers at work in America, and only a few of them (I think the number might be as low as five per cent) can support their families and themselves with their work. There’s always some grant money available, but it’s never enough to go around. As for government subsidies for creative writers, perish the thought. Tobacco subsidies, sure. Research grants to study the motility of unpreserved bull sperm, of course. Creative-writing subsidies, never. …America has never much revered her creative people; as a whole, we’re more interested in commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint and Internet greeting-cards. And if you don’t like it, it’s a case of tough titty, said the kitty, ‘cause that’s just the way things are. Americans are a lot more interested in TV quiz shows than in the short fiction of Raymond Carver.”
“The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.”
“A kid of your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?”
“No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”
“C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.”
“Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.”
“Definition Of A Wanderer: A guy who's always looking beyond”
“It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.”
“If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?”
“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”
“Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity”
“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
“A cat won't curry favor even if it's in their best interests to do so. A cat can't be a hypocrite. If more preachers were like cats, this would be a more religious country.”
“You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.”
“A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.”
“norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had puked on homer gamache that time he had found homer sprawled in a ditch out by homeland cemetary, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.”
“If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.”
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. ”
“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
“Never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself.”
“This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.”
“Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.”
“We never cease wanting what we want, whether it's good for us or not.”
“When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.”
“They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I've been there for the last eight years.”
“In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.”
“The wife whose sweetly given reply in the face of any problem would be, "Whatever you think is best, dear." Women, take note: a wife like that never needs to fear bubbling away the last of her life through a cut throat.”
“He's a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never makes me cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees. Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.”
“don't give me what I ask for, give me what I need...”
“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.”
“In the Land of Memory the time is always Now.In the Kingdom of Ago, the clocks tick... but their hands never move.There is an Unfound Door(O lost)and memory is the key which opens it.”