Best Stephen King Quotes

[johnski]

Whats your favourite quote by Stephen King.

Mine are:

A snowflake is a snowflake by definition but there are never any two alike

Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying



Whats yours and why?

[JohnDalglish]

Hi,

Welcome to the MB, and keep posting!

Once you've reached ten posts you can join the Social Groups (click on 'Community' above then click on 'Groups') and there's a Group specifically dedicated to quotes from Sai King (called, with stunning originality, 'Quotes'!)

Long days and pleasant nights

[TriggerHappy]

I feel the need to point out that "get busy living or get busy dying" was actually Stephen King quoting Bob Dylan...as he is so often wont to do. ("You will not die, it's not poison" and "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" seem to be two more of his unattributed Dylan favorites.)

[blunthead]

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs." Keep posting!!!

[johnski]

Cool, i shall check that out!

Any more quotes?

[Haunted]

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

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
Stephen King

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
Stephen King

[johnski]

watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged. -- Possibly the funniest quote :D

[JohnDalglish]

I feel the need to point out that "get busy living or get busy dying" was actually Stephen King quoting Bob Dylan...

Hi,

The Dylan line actually is -

''He not busy being born is busy dying'.
('Its alright ma (I'm only bleeding))

And the weatherman line (from whence they got their name) is from 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'.

Long days and pleasant nights

[omm poppa mow mow]

http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1261866457p2/3389.jpg (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fauthor%2Fshow%2F3389.Stephen_King) "On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?"
— Stephen King (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fauthor%2Fquotes%2F3389.Stephen_King) (The Green Mile Book Box Set (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F15599))

[Spideyman]

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.

STEPHEN KING, Entertainment Weekly, Aug. 17, 2007

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

[blunthead]

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.

[TriggerHappy]

Thanks for the correction, John. I did have a suspicion it wasn't exactly how it went.

My favorite quote is pretty long, and it's by Paul Sheldon, to boot:wink2:

"It always look dat way, Boss Ian," Hezekiah said. "No matter how you look at her, she seem like she be lookin' at you. I doan know if it be true, but the Bourkas, dey say even when you get behin' her, the goddess, she seem to be lookin' at you."
"But she is, after all, only a piece of stone," Ian remonstrated.
"Yes, Boss Ian," Hezekiah agreed. "Dat what give her her powah."

[omm poppa mow mow]

http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1261866457p2/3389.jpg (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fauthor%2Fshow%2F3389.Stephen_King) "They stared at each other uneasily and bunched closer together like small boys in a lightning storm or cows in a blizzard. There was a raw redness in that swelling sound of Crowd. A hunger that was numbing. Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devouring them all alive."
— Stephen King (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fauthor%2Fquotes%2F3389.Stephen_King) (The Long Walk (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/redirector.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com% 2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F522169))

[Srbo]

I'm tired, boss. Tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. Tired of not ever having me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we's coming from or going to, or why. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world everyday. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time.

( The Green Mile )

[JellybeanJay]

Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to - Delores Claiborne

[randallFlaggfan1]

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.

-On Writing

[randallFlaggfan1]

"Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this."

- Lisey's Story

[Haunted]

-- Possibly the funniest quote :D

Not only funneee BUT so true, so true!! I felt vindicated when I read it--thought I was all alone in this world thinking that that was the gol darndest dumbas**ed flick I had ever seen in my life!!!

[johnski]

Stephen King is a craftsman with words, He knows how they should be placed, A true genious in the litery world

[Wayne C. Rogers]

My two favorite quotes come from The Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living, or get busy dying" and "Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." Those two quotes kept me from giving up when I was in the hospital and nearly died. In fact, I drove the nurses crazy with quotes for Shawshank.

[Patricia A]

My personal favorite is, 'every day's a school day'.

[Alexandra19]

And there I regret not to read in English...
About quotes, Wireman has got some good ones on his own in Duma Key.

[GNTLGNT]

http://www.myspaceclipart.com/quotes/abrandnewquoteseventeen.jpg

[Becks19]

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
— Stephen King

[JohnDalglish]

Hi,

ALL of On Writing really (I'm just re-reading it!).

Long days and pleasant nights

[Alexandra19]

I found this one on the Internet (I am not really cheating, I just read in French) : "If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were."
I think I'm gonna make it my epitaph !

[Haunted]

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

[blunthead]

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.

[Becks19]

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
— Stephen King

[randallFlaggfan1]

"A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…"

-UR

[Hicks]

What came to my mind is something Stephen said in an interview. He actually quoted his mother, what she had said about him loving to tell stories:

"You're a people-pleaser, Stephen. It's good thing you're a boy, or you'd always be pregnant."

[blunthead]

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

[Becks19]

"The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there..."
— Stephen King

"Hug and kiss whoever helped get you - financially, mentally, morally, emotionally - to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. 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

[psj77]

Parkins smiled and moved away. "Good enough. I doubt like hell that it's a signed confession to anything."

Ben smiled back. "Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything."

'Salem's Lot

[blunthead]

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.

[Becks19]

"I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much."
— Stephen King (The Bachman Books)

[Todevod]

This line from the end of DT7 brought me to tears- "I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of New York, whom I call my own true son!" -Roland of Gilead

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." -Sai King

[Laymonking]

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

[Martianette]

From The Stand (also my favorite SK novel):

(Spoken by Frannie Goldsmith):
"They're your clothes too, Mr. Stuart Redman. You may be a Founding Father and all that, but you still leave an occasional skidmark in your underdrawers."

And I also love Stu's reply:
"That's crude, darlin."

[amanda1812]

When Billy Halleck (Thinner) is travelling in a taxi on a hot day with a smelly driver he thinks "He smells like ten pounds of **** in a five pound bag"

[Stormseye]

Pet Cemetery:

Sometimes dead is better.

An Evening with Harry, Carrie, and Garp:

Hitchhiker: We're just going up the road.
Old man: Well, Jump in. I don't have anything in the trunk but a load of dead bodies.

[Debbie913]

As we all know, SK wrote The Eyes of the Dragon for his daughter, Naomi. When she finished reading it, she gave him a hug and said the only thing wrong with it was that she didn't want it to end. SK referred to this as "a writer's favorite song." That has been one quote that stands out in my mind since I read it. (found on the back flap of the dust jacket in the book.)

[Unregistered]

Ghosts are real, Monsters are real. They live inside us and sometimes they win.

[blunthead]

From the New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/lifetimes/kin-v-rawmeat.html)...


'EVER ET RAW MEAT?' AND OTHER WEIRD QUESTIONS

IT seems to me that, in the minds of readers, writers actually exist to serve two purposes, and the more important may not be the writing of books and stories. The primary function of writers, it seems, is to answer readers' questions. These fall into three categories. The third is the one that fascinates me most, but I'll identify the other two first.
The One-of-a-Kind Questions: Each day's mail brings a few of these. Often they reflect the writer's field of interest - history, horror, romance, the American West, outer space, big business. The only thing they have in common is their uniqueness. Novelists are frequently asked where they get their ideas (see category No. 2), but writers must wonder where this relentless curiosity, these really strange questions, come from.
There was, for instance, the young woman who wrote to me from a penal institution in Minnesota. She informed me she was a kleptomaniac. She further informed me that I was her favorite writer, and she had stolen every one of my books she could get her hands on. ''But after I stole 'Different Seasons' from the library and read it, I felt moved to send it back,'' she wrote. ''Do you think this means you wrote this one the best?'' After due consideration, I decided that reform on the part of the reader has nothing to do with artistic merit. I came close to writing back to find out if she had stolen ''Misery'' yet but decided I ought to just keep my mouth shut.

From Bill V. in North Carolina: ''I see you have a beard. Are you morbid of razors?''
From Carol K. in Hawaii: ''Will you soon write of pimples or some other facial blemish?''
From Don G., no address (and a blurry postmark): ''Why do you keep up this disgusting mother worship when anyone with any sense knows a MAN has no use to his mother once he is weened?''
From Raymond R. in Mississippi: ''Ever et raw meat?'' (It's the laconic ones like this that really get me.) I have been asked if I beat my children and/or my wife. I have been asked to parties in places I have never been and hope never to go. I was once asked to give away the bride at a wedding, and one young woman sent me an ounce of pot, with the attached question: ''This is where I get my inspiration - where do you get yours?'' Actually, mine usually comes in envelopes - the kind through which you can view your name and address printed by a computer - that arrive at the end of every month.
My favorite question of this type, from Anchorage, asked simply: ''How could you write such a why?'' Unsigned. If E. E. Cummings were still alive, I'd try to find out if he'd moved to the Big North.
The Old Standards: These are the questions writers dream of answering when they are collecting rejection slips, and the ones they tire of quickest once they start to publish. In other words, they are the questions that come up without fail in every dull interview the writer has ever given or will ever give. I'll enumerate a few of them:

Where do you get your ideas? (I get mine in Utica.) How do you get an agent? (Sell your soul to the Devil.) Do you have to know somebody to get published? (Yes; in fact, it helps to grovel, toady and be willing to perform twisted acts of sexual depravity at a moment's notice, and in public if necessary.) How do you start a novel? (I usually start by writing the number 1 in the upper right-hand corner of a clean sheet of paper.) How do you write best sellers? (Same way you get an agent.) How do you sell your book to the movies? (Tell them they don't want it.) What time of day do you write? (It doesn't matter; if I don't keep busy enough, the time inevitably comes.) Do you ever run out of ideas? (Does a bear defecate in the woods?) Who is your favorite writer? (Anyone who writes stories I would have written had I thought of them first.) There are others, but they're pretty boring, so let us march on...[cont]

[blunthead]

'EVER ET RAW MEAT?' AND OTHER WEIRD QUESTIONS

[cont]...The Real Weirdies: Here I am, bopping down the street, on my morning walk, when some guy pulls over in his pickup truck or just happens to walk by and says, ''Hi, Steve! Writing any good books lately?'' I have an answer for this; I've developed it over the years out of pure necessity. I say, ''I'm taking some time off.'' I say that even if I'm working like mad, thundering down homestretch on a book. The reason why I say this is because no other answer seems to fit. Believe me, I know. In the course of the trial and error that has finally resulted in ''I'm taking some time off,'' I have discarded about 500 other answers.

Having an answer for ''You writing any good books lately?'' is a good thing, but I'd be lying if I said it solves the problem of what the question means. It is this inability on my part to make sense of this odd query, which reminds me of that Zen riddle - ''Why is a mouse when it runs?'' - that leaves me feeling mentally shaken and impotent. You see, it isn't just one question; it is a bundle of questions, cunningly wrapped up in one package. It's like that old favorite, ''Are you still beating your wife?'' If I answer in the affirmative, it means I may have written - how many books? two? four? - (all of them good) in the last - how long? Well, how long is ''lately''? It could mean I wrote maybe three good books just last week, or maybe two on this very walk up to Bangor International Airport and back! On the other hand, if I say no, what does that mean? I wrote three or four bad books in the last ''lately'' (surely ''lately'' can be no longer than a month, six weeks at the outside)?

Or here I am, signing books at the Betts' Bookstore or B. Dalton's in the local consumer factory (nicknamed ''the mall''). This is something I do twice a year, and it serves much the same purpose as those little bundles of twigs religious people in the Middle Ages used to braid into whips and flagellate themselves with. During the course of this exercise in madness and self-abnegation, at least a dozen people will approach the little coffee table where I sit behind a barrier of books and ask brightly, ''Don't you wish you had a rubber stamp?'' I have an answer to this one, too, an answer that has been developed over the years in a trial-and-error method similar to ''I'm taking some time off.'' The answer to the rubber-stamp question is: ''No, I don't mind.''

Never mind if I really do or don't (this time it's my own motivations I want to skip over, you'll notice); the question is, Why does such an illogical query occur to so many people? My signature is actually stamped on the covers of several of my books, but people seem just as eager to get these signed as those that aren't so stamped. Would these questioners stand in line for the privilege of watching me slam a rubber stamp down on the title page of ''The Shining'' or ''Pet Sematary''? I don't think they would.

If you still don't sense something peculiar in these questions, this one might help convince you. I'm sitting in the cafe around the corner from my house, grabbing a little lunch by myself and reading a book (reading at the table is one of the few bad habits acquired in my youth that I have nobly resisted giving up) until a customer or maybe even a waitress sidles up and asks, ''How come you're not reading one of your own books?''

THIS hasn't happened just once, or even occasionally; it happens a lot. The computer-generated answer to this question usually gains a chuckle, although it is nothing but the pure, logical and apparent truth. ''I know how they all come out,'' I say. End of exchange. Back to lunch, with only a pause to wonder why people assume you want to read what you wrote, rewrote, read again following the obligatory editorial conference and yet again during the process of correcting the mistakes that a good copy editor always prods, screaming, from their hiding places (I once heard a crime writer suggest that God could have used a copy editor, and while I find the notion slightly blasphemous, I tend to agree). And then people sometimes ask in that chatty, let's-strike-up-a-conversation way people have, ''How long does it take you to write a book?'' Perfectly reasonable question - at least until you try to answer it and discover there is no answer. This time the computer-generated answer is a total falsehood, but it at least serves the purpose of advancing the conversation to some more discussable topic. ''Usually about nine months,'' I say, ''the same length of time it takes to make a baby.'' This satisfies everyone but me. I know that nine months is just an average, and probably a completely fictional one at that. It ignores ''The Running Man'' (published under the name Richard Bachman), which was written in four days during a snowy February vacation when I was teaching high school. It also ignores ''It'' and my latest, ''The Tommyknockers.'' ''It'' is over 1,000 pages long and took four years to write. ''The Tommyknockers'' is 400 pages shorter but took five years to write.

Do I mind these questions? Yes . . . and no. Anyone minds questions that have no real answers and thus expose the fellow being questioned to be not a real doctor but a sort of witch doctor. But no one - at least no one with a modicum of simple human kindness - resents questions from people who honestly want answers. And now and then someone will ask a really interesting question, like, Do you write in the nude? The answer -not generated by computer - is: I don't think I ever have, but if it works, I'm willing to try it.

[Becks19]

“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 (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3389.Stephen_King)

This has always been one of my favorites!

[mjs9153]

I am pretty easy to please I suppose,mine is "The man in black fled across the desert,and the gunslinger followed.." not really a quote,but a line,to my mind the best first line of a modern fiction book-even though not a quote,am sure it is quoted many times by fans..tho no doubt he would quibble and offer up something stellar from someone he admires,this is my favorite,got the tshirt to prove it..:grinning:

[GNTLGNT]

http://writerzblox.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/watercolour-keys-wallpaper.jpg

[Becks19]

“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”
― Stephen King (http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3389.Stephen_King), The Wind Through the Keyhole (http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/15678889)

[KJ Norrbotten]

"Ah God and sonny Jesus, time was like a river and he wondered if that writer fella knew that" Weasel Craig, Salem's Lot

Lately, for some reason, this line has been on my mind quite frequently.

[Phildude]

How cool, that on my first visit here, the first thread to catch my eye is an appropriate place (I hope) for my first post. My favorite quote of all time, SK or otherwise:

"...if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question." - It