Stephen King

Obession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases... the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it... You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts.

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes , and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much , we reason, how could we not be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?

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.

You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought.

You can't deny laughter. When it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

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

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

I have to remind myself that some birds weren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knew it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But your world is just that much colder and emptier when they're gone. I don't know... maybe I just miss my friend.

Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way around.

If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance... logic can be happily tossed out the window.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

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

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

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.

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.

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.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

The most important things are the hardest to say because words diminish them.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.