Top 500 Stephen King Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”

— Stephen King

302. “The worst advice? ‘Don’t listen to the critics.’ I think that you really ought to listen to the critics, because sometimes they’re telling you something is broken that you can fix.”

— Stephen King

303. “There are things of such darkness and horror – just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty – that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”

— Stephen King

304. “Clear communication between selves – the surface self and the deep self – is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.”

— Stephen King

305. “Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.”

— Stephen King

306. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

— Stephen King

307. “Time is a face on the water.”

— Stephen King

308. “The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to change.”

— Stephen King

309. “We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.”

— Stephen King

310. “Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.”

— Stephen King

311. “We’re all dying. The world’s just a hospice with fresh air.”

— Stephen King

312. “A man who lies about beer makes enemies.”

— Stephen King

313. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...”

— Stephen King

314. “I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”

— Stephen King

315. “True love always happens in a flash.”

— Stephen King

316. “A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.”

— Stephen King

317. “I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there.”

— Stephen King

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318. “I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.”

— Stephen King

319. “When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.”

— Stephen King

320. “Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”

— Stephen King

321. “If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.”

— Stephen King

322. “Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.”

— Stephen King

323. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Book Quotes

324. “My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.”

— Stephen King

325. “I have the world’s best job. I get paid to hang out in my imagination all day.”

— Stephen King

326. “There’s always someone who knows something.”

— Stephen King

327. “I have no opinion. No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.”

— Stephen King

328. “The first draft of a book – even a long one – should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Book Quotes

329. “If you can read in the 21st century you own the world.”

— Stephen King

330. “If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.”

— Stephen King

331. “Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.”

— Stephen King

332. “If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. – Japanese Proverb.”

— Stephen King

333. “I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”

— Stephen King

334. “God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once.”

— Stephen King

335. “She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn’t care which, she wad overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”

— Stephen King

336. “Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.”

— Stephen King

337. “Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.”

— Stephen King

338. “Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Book Quotes

339. “Constant reading will pull you into a place – a mind-set, if you like the phrase – where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Reading Quotes

340. “May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.”

— Stephen King

341. “Ka was like a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started.”

— Stephen King

342. “It was like drowning, only from the inside out.”

— Stephen King

343. “See the TURTLE of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth. His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind. On his back all vows are made; He sees the truth but may not said. He loves the land and loves the sea, And even loves a child like me.”

— Stephen King

344. “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”

— Stephen King

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

345. “The mystery of the universe is not time but size.”

— Stephen King

346. “He found himself still with too many questions and not enough answers.”

— Stephen King

347. “People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality.”

— Stephen King

348. “Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.”

— Stephen King

349. “Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.”

— Stephen King

350. “There’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.”

— Stephen King