Stephen King

“Si entre dos personas no se produce nada especial, un instante como ése se pierde en el naufragio general de la memoria.”

“El pesar auténtico es tan escaso como el amor auténtico.”

“Todos odian y nunca dejan de hacerlo. Nunca se cansan de ello.”

“The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.”

“It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found.”

“Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again.”

“Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”

“The palm of his hand was a dull red. Not a good sign.I jerk off left-handed, he thought, at least that’s something.”

“But that's not a very original idea, is it? It's really just a platitude ... sort of like a Florida sunset, Nevertheless, it happens to be the truth, and the truth deserves to be spoken... if you can say it in a new way, I tried to put it in a picture.”

“Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.”

“Then, as understanding began to trickle through his shock, he felt an escalating sense of horror. It had finally happened; he had finally lost enough of his mind so that other people would be able to *tell*.”

“Fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.”

“The only religions I don't like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.”

“The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force … and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.”

“She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown.”

“There are worlds other than these.”

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.”

“Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.”

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”

“Everybody knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.”

“He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and ha must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if I'd closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille”

“Lo mejor es que no le parezco osco ni reservado. Elaine y yo pasamos mucho tiempo juntos; supongo que si no tuviese una edad tan grotesca, diría que es mi chica. Sin embargo no está mal que sólo sea una amiga especial; a veces es mejor que una novia. Nos ahorramos muchos de los problemas que trae aparejados el noviazgo, y, aunque sé que nadie por debajo de los cincuenta me creerá, en ocasiones las cenizas son mejores que una auténtica fogata. Es extraño, pero cierto.”

“The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”

“She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly....perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant.”

“But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors andartists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that neverwere, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in theirfantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.”

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

“We're like old acquaintances on trains going in different directions.”

“I can see your dirtypillows.”

“Let God have His own cat.”

“Everything that goes around comes around, they say, and although I've never been able to figure out who the mysteriously wise sages known as "they" might be, they're certainly right when it comes to time-travel.”

“Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren't choices at all.”

“For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid.”

“Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.”

“Sure I'd had second thoughts. But thoughts are not choices.”

“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”

“Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I'd ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn't much of an adventure.”

“For Gilead and the Calla!" he roared. "Now, gunslingers! Now, you Sisters of Oriza! Now, now! Kill them! No Quarter! Kill them all!”

“I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).”

“...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.”

“Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.” Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”

“For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...”

“Nothing seems to last. But the bullet. The bullet is constant. The bullet is always there. You wait in line, that's all. And when it's your turn to ride the bullet, maybe you ride, maybe you run. Either way it comes to the same thing. Fun is fun. And done is done”

“Beans, beans, the musical fruit,The more you eat, the more you toot.”

“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.”

“And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.”

“But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.”

“If your car won't start, curse it ... and be sure you curse it female.”

“I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a belly-ache.”

“The multiple choices of possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to.”

“What it comes down to, Red, is some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That's called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt.”