110+ Stephen King Quotes On Writing, Horror And Reading

Stephen King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. He is one of the world's best-selling authors, with more than 350 million copies of his books sold. His books have been adapted into numerous feature films, television series, and comic books. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Stephen King on writing, horror, love.

Top 10 Stephen King Quotes

1. Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
2. You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
3. The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.
4. A life without love is like a tree without fruit.
5. The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
6. Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
7. Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.
8. You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
9. The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
10. People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

Stephen King Image Quotes

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset. — Stephen King

A life without love is like a tree without fruit. — Stephen King

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. — Stephen King

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk. — Stephen King

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. — Stephen King

There will be water if God wills it. — Stephen King

Go then, there are other worlds than these. — Stephen King

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. — Stephen King

The devil's voice is sweet to hear. — Stephen King

Stephen King Short Quotes

• The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
• Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
• May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!
• First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead
• There will be water if God wills it.
• Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
• Go then, there are other worlds than these.
• Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.
• The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
• Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Stephen King Quotes About Writing

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. — Stephen King

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea. — Stephen King

Books are a uniquely portable magic. — Stephen King

Fiction is the truth inside the lie. — Stephen King

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. — Stephen King

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar. — Stephen King

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. — Stephen King

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Horror

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. — Stephen King

I am your number one fan. — Stephen King

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception. — Stephen King

The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him. — Stephen King

I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale. — Stephen King

The horror genre is an extremely delicate thing. You can talk to filmmakers and even psychologists who've studied the genre, and even they don't understand what works or what doesn't work. More importantly, they don't understand why it works when it works. — Stephen King

I've been typed as a horror writer, and I've always said to people, "I don't care what you call me as long as the checks don't bounce and the family gets fed." — Stephen King

There are a lot of people in the field [ of horror stories] that I do read. There is a lot of stuff that is written in this field, though, that is not very good. You just have to look for the good stuff. — Stephen King

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time. — Stephen King

The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Love

If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours. — Stephen King

and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure. — Stephen King

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love. — Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest to say — Stephen King

Love among the ruins... I'll tell you something, my friend: Weird love's better than no love at all. — Stephen King

They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark. — Stephen King

But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart. — Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them. — Stephen King

But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. [...] True sorrow is as rare as true love. — Stephen King

Love didn't grow very well in place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Reading

Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. — Stephen King

For me, that emotional payoff is what it’s all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story...or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school. — Stephen King

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. — Stephen King

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters. — Stephen King

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose. — Stephen King

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. — Stephen King

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it. — Stephen King

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Books

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library. — Stephen King

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life. — Stephen King

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. — Stephen King

Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different. — Stephen King

You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you. — Stephen King

Without story books is like a person with no soul. — Stephen King

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home. — Stephen King

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Life

It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory. — Stephen King

Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. — Stephen King

I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. — Stephen King

Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister. — Stephen King

You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright. — Stephen King

Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it? — Stephen King

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life. — Stephen King

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Friendship

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you? — Stephen King

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too. — Stephen King

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do. — Stephen King

I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Fear

The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear? Yes. My Imagination. I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself." Then you have a small imagination. — Stephen King

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. — Stephen King

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. — Stephen King

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. — Stephen King

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time. — Stephen King

Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend. — Stephen King

It's alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it. — Stephen King

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life. — Stephen King

I tend to scare myself. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Marriage

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. — Stephen King

Trust, a sense of humor, and don't let the sun go down on an argument without trying to make it up. That's all I know about good marriage. I've been married a long time - it seems to be working. — Stephen King

Marriage is referred to in the bible as “mystical union,” and it really is in the sense that two people who don’t know each other get together. I’m always interested in how much you find out about the other person and how much you don’t find out. — Stephen King

Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About Write

I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar. — Stephen King

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody. — Stephen King

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time." — Stephen King

I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you. — Stephen King

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. — Stephen King

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. — Stephen King

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them that I have the heart of a small boy -- and I keep it in a jar on my desk. — Stephen King

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to. — Stephen King

I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. I think we tend to write out our phobias. — Stephen King

Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it's work... Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything. — Stephen King

Stephen King Quotes About People

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. — Stephen King

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. — Stephen King

Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor — Stephen King

No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart. — Stephen King

If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be. — Stephen King

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk. — Stephen King

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. — Stephen King

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. — Stephen King

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling. — Stephen King

He did it (listened) as the world's most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker's face, making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and intellectually savvy person on the planet. — Stephen King

Stephen King Famous Quotes And Sayings

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset. — Stephen King

A life without love is like a tree without fruit. — Stephen King

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. — Stephen King

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk. — Stephen King

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet. — Stephen King

The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies. — Stephen King

I do not kill with my gun; He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart. — Stephen King

I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart. — Stephen King

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle. — Stephen King

There will be water if God wills it. — Stephen King

Go then, there are other worlds than these. — Stephen King

A person’s never too old for stories. Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. - Roland Deschain — Stephen King

If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. — Stephen King

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. — Stephen King

The devil's voice is sweet to hear. — Stephen King

What if I fall?', Tim cried. Maerlyn laughed. 'Sooner or later, we all do. — Stephen King

As for the end of the universe…I say let it come as it will, in ice, fire, or darkness. What did the universe ever do for me that I should mind its welfare? — Stephen King

Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it...I have written because it fulfilled me. ... I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever. — Stephen King

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym. — Stephen King

If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you. — Stephen King

When all else fails, give up and go to the library. — Stephen King

"Am I weird?" "Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird." — Stephen King

We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand. — Stephen King

Gordie: Do you think I'm weird? Chris: Definitely. Gordie: No man, seriously. Am I weird? Chris: Yeah, but so what? Everybody's weird — Stephen King

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer. — Stephen King

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. — Stephen King

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't. — Stephen King

As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion? — Stephen King

Time is a keyhole.... 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. — Stephen King

Teddy, Vern, Chris: I don't shut up. I grow up. And when I look at you, I throw up. Aghhh! Gordie: And then your mom goes around the corner and she licks it up. — Stephen King

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. — Stephen King

We lie best when we lie to ourselves. — Stephen King

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant. — Stephen King

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. — Stephen King

I've given up thinking - it keeps getting me into trouble. — Stephen King

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith. — Stephen King

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king. — Stephen King

Money talks, bullshit walks. — Stephen King

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged. — Stephen King

Busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. — Stephen King

Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. — Stephen King

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out. — Stephen King

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just... come out the other side. Or you don't. — Stephen King

It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then. — Stephen King

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

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. — Stephen King

Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone. — Stephen King

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live. — Stephen King

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. — Stephen King

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all. — Stephen King

And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not. — Stephen King

Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him. — Stephen King

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one. — Stephen King

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache. — Stephen King

Life Lessons by Stephen King

1. Stephen King teaches us that perseverance and hard work are essential to success, as he has overcome many obstacles in his career and has become one of the most successful authors of all time.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of facing our fears, as many of his stories involve characters confronting their inner demons.
3. Finally, Stephen King encourages us to use our imaginations, as he has created a vast array of imaginative worlds and characters in his works.