Stephen King (b. 1947)

Quotes

• 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.