Stephen King

“Plums deify.”

“Such a ridiculous man hardly deserved to live.”

“...the scholar's greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.”

“And, you know, I hope you have some fun with this book. Nosh and nibble at the corners or read the mother straight through, but enjoy. That's what it's for, as much as any of the novels. Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just make you mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer.”

“It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.”

“And above [the three of] them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage.”

“Son los hombres quienes se declaran a la luz de la luna y son las mujeres quienes piden el divorcio. No siempre ocurre así; pero casi siempre.”

“He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn’t even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.”

“The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.”

“The devil you knew was always preferable to the devil you didn't.”

“Roland’s heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.”

“A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.”

“Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.”

“Love is old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a canibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it is always hungry”

“Empezó a llorar, no histéricamente o a gritos, como llora la gente cuando disimula la rabia con lágrimas, sino con los sollozos continuos de quien acaba de descubrir que está solo y lo estará durante mucho tiempo. Lloró porque la seguridad y la razón parecían haber abandonado el mundo. La soledad era esto, una realidad, pero en esta situación la locura era asimismo una posibilidad nada remota.”

“Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it.”

“Dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who dream - or don't dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up - are mentally constipated in some way.”

“That thing about don't look up here, you're pissing on your shoes, forinstance, was that humor? Or a growl of rage?--All That You Love Will Be Carried Away.”

“He rolled and thrashed in his bed, waiting for the dancing blue shadows to come in his window, waiting for the heavy knock on his door, waiting for some bodiless, Kafkaesque voice to call: Okay, open up in there! And when he finally fell asleep he did it without knowing it, because thought continued without a break, shifting from conscious rumination to the skewed world of dreams with hardly a break, like a car going from drive to low. Even in his dreams he thought he was awake, and in his dreams he committed suicide over and over: burned himself; bludgeoned himself by standing under an anvil and pulling a rope; hanged himself; blew out the stove’s pilot lights and then turned on the oven and all four burners; shot himself; defenestrated himself; stepped in front of a moving Greyhound bus; swallowed pills; swallowed Vanish toilet bowl disinfectant; stuck a can of Glade Pine Fresh aerosol in his mouth, pushed the button, and inhaled until his head floated off into the sky like a child’s balloon; committed hara-kiri while kneeling in a confessional at St. Dom’s, confessing his self-murder to a dumbfounded young priest even as his guts accordioned out onto the bench like beef stew, performing an act of contrition in a fading, bemused voice as he lay in his blood and the steaming sausages of his intestines. But most vividly, over and over, he saw himself behind the wheel of the LTD, racing the engine a little in the closed garage, taking deep breaths and leafing through a copy of National Geographic, examining pictures of life in Tahiti and Aukland and the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, turning the pages ever more slowly, until the sound of the engine faded to a faraway sweet hum and the green waters of the South Pacific inundated him in rocking warmth and took him down to a silver fathom.”

“There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

“You could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all.”

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

“But none of them taught me the things I learned from Carrie White. The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

“There were times—especially in summer, while swallowing my afternoon salt-pill—when it occurred to me that I was simply repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I’d think This isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then I’d think Half the world has the same idea.”

“A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.”

“Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars. Yes, I think so. 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.”

“For a woman a man will do many things that he'd turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he'd back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk adn with a bunch of his friends egging him on.”

“When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.”

“Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.”

“If something got you to turn off T.V. , it's a total success”

“He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.”

“That life was richer,' a voice deep in his mind whispered. 'This one is truer,' whispered another, even deeper.”

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

“Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites. it's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.”

“Even at eleven, he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.”

“That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.”

“It's only a little secret, but having a secret makes me feel better. Like a human being again.”

“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.”

“I like to hang out clothes on windy days. Sometimes that's all I feel like. A sheet on a line.”

“That's what a shrink is for; friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity.”

“There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.”

“The lawn of Placerville High School is a very good one. It does not fuck around.”

“A veces los perros perdidos vuelven a casa.”

“Because it makes me happy when the words fall together and the picture comes and the make-believe people do things that delight me. But it's better with you, Constant Reader. Always better with you.”

“Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.”

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day... fifty the day after that... and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's—GASP!!—too late.”

“You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.”

“The fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.”

“I'm going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there in Thomaston, I'm gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS.”