Top 500 Stephen King Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “A change is as good as a rest.”

— Stephen King

53. “The monster never dies.”

— Stephen King

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

— Stephen King

55. “The scholar’s greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.”

— Stephen King

56. “JK Rowling created seven Horcruxes. She put a part of her soul in every book and now her books will live forever.”

— Stephen King

57. “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.”

— Stephen King

58. “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”

— Stephen King

59. “I write to find out what I think.”

— Stephen King

60. “Only God gets things right the first time.”

— Stephen King

61. “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

— Stephen King

62. “Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”

— Stephen King

63. “When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”

— Stephen King

64. “Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.”

— Stephen King

65. “It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

— Stephen King

66. “Time and tide wait for no man.”

— Stephen King

67. “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

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

— Stephen King

69. “Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It’s better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.”

— Stephen King

70. “Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.”

— Stephen King

71. “A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.”

— Stephen King

72. “I work until beer o’clock.”

— Stephen King

73. “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”

— Stephen King

74. “A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.”

— Stephen King

75. “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

76. “The turtle couldn’t help us.”

— Stephen King

77. “Talent is never static. It’s always growing or dying.”

— Stephen King

78. “Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”

— Stephen King

79. “A short story is like a kiss in the dark.”

— Stephen King

80. “Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”

— Stephen King

81. “If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.”

— Stephen King

82. “Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”

— Stephen King

83. “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

84. “The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.”

— Stephen King

85. “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”

— Stephen King

86. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

— Stephen King

87. “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

88. “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

89. “It’s a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.”

— Stephen King

90. “The thought process can never be complete without articulation.”

— Stephen King

91. “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

92. “In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”

— Stephen King

93. “I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It’s you I’m not entirely sure of.”

— Stephen King

94. “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

95. “A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

— Stephen King

96. “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

97. “There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.”

— Stephen King

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

— Stephen King

99. “If you want to play, you gotta pay.”

— Stephen King

100. “First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead.”

— Stephen King