Top 500 Stephen King Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Do it for joy and you can do it forever.”

— Stephen King

2. “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

— Stephen King

3. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

4. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

5. “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Hope

6. “The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

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

— Stephen King

Featured in: Success Quotes

8. “Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

9. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

10. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

— Stephen King

11. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

12. “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”

— Stephen King

13. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Books And Reading

14. “There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.”

— Stephen King

15. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

16. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

17. “Above all else, be consistent.”

— Stephen King

18. “Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About World

19. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing, Quotes About Heart

20. “Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. ”

— Stephen King

21. “I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”

— Stephen King

22. “You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.”

— Stephen King

23. “Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair.”

— Stephen King

24. “When the time is gone, you can never get it back.”

— Stephen King

25. “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Real Quotes, Winning Quotes, Hate Quotes

26. “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

— Stephen King

27. “Time heals all wounds.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Healing Quotes

28. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

29. “Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Book Quotes

30. “To write is human, to edit is divine.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

31. “The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Brain

32. “The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Trust

33. “The most important things are the hardest to say.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Important Quotes

34. “Be true, be brave, stand All the rest is darkness.”

— Stephen King

35. “When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘one word at a time.’”

— Stephen King

37. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Memories, Quotes About Ocean

38. “If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Passion Quotes

39. “The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Bullying Quotes

40. “Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”

— Stephen King

41. “Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.”

— Stephen King

42. “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Imagination Quotes

43. “Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.”

— Stephen King

44. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Reading Quotes

45. “I’m most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Mind Quotes

46. “Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Sarcastic Quotes

47. “The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Imagination Quotes

48. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

— Stephen King

49. “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

— Stephen King

50. “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

— Stephen King