133 Thoughtful Stephen King Quotes from Horror to Romance

Famous Stephen King Quotes

Let's check some Stephen King quotes that are popular among fans.

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

• “Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?”

• “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

• “When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.”

• “The devil’s voice is sweet to hear.”

• “People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

• “Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

• “The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”

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

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

• “Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”

• “I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.”

• “Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map… A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first, you give to it.”

• “If you liked being a teenager, there’s something really wrong with you.”

• “The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.”

• “You can’t polish a turd.”

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

• “There’s nothing as human as hunger. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.”

• “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.”

• “Don’t give me what I ask for, give me what I need.”

• “God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often”

• “I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.”

Stephen King Quotes on Writing

For the writers, below are some Stephen King quotes about writing you might like.

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

• “When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

• “Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”

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

• “I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn’t have time to buy any rope or pitons.”

• “I write to find out what I think.”

• “I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.”

• “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

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

• “Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.”

• “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.”

• “Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.”

• “You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

• “Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.”

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

• “If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”

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

• “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.”

• “Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it…I have written because it fulfilled me. … I did it for the pure joy of the things. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

• “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.”

• “And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.”

• “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.”

• “There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It’s a tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don’t think conceptually while I work on a first draft―I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”

• “Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. Imagine if you like, Frankenstein’s monster on its slab. Here comes lightning, not from the sky but from a humble paragraph of English words. Maybe it’s the first really good paragraph you wrote, something so fragile and yet full of possibility that you are frightened. You feel as Victor Frankenstein must have when the dead conglomeration of sewn-together spare parts suddenly opened its watery yellow eyes. Oh my God, it’s breathing, you realize. Maybe it’s even thinking. What in hell’s name do I do next?”

• “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story… When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

• “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

• “I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there’s a house under there, and I’m pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That’s how I feel. It’s like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: ‘If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.’”

• “As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?”

• “Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.”

Stephen King Quotes on Life

Find some wise Stephen King quotes about life here.

• "Be true, be brave, stand"

• “It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.”

• “We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.”

• “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.”

• “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

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

• “We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”

• “Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

• “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.”

• “When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.”

• “You have to stay faithful to what you’re working on.”

• “Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.”

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

• “Time is a keyhole… We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do–the wind that blows through the keyhole–is the breath of all the living universe.”

• “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.”

• “But I believe in love, you know; love is uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.”

• “Alone. Yes, that’s the keyword, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”

• “People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.”

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

• "We have been given life to deny death."

• “What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....”

• “There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.”

• “Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”

Stephen King Quotes on Love

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Read some of these Stephen King quotes if you want to deepen your knowledge about love.

• “That was what I wanted, but I don’t need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.”

• “Love isn’t soft like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.”

• “True sorrow is as rare as true love.”

• “We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.” ― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

• “Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.”

• “Love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and make them crawl..we were..so much in love..” ― Stephen King

• “Sometimes... real love is silent as well as blind.” ― Stephen King, The Stand

• “But I believe in love, you know; love is uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and the mind calls to mind and heart to heart.” ― Stephen King

• “When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this are all I have and all I am and all I ask.” ― Stephen King

• “Because you may not love the candy-man, but you do love the candy.”

• “True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring — once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.” ― Stephen King

• “Hearts are tough, Most times they don’t break. Most times they are only bend”

• “A life without love is like a tree without fruit.”

• “This is what romance gets you–a noose around your neck and a crazy woman with two guns somewhere behind you.”

• “You’ve called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility.”

• “Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear.”

• “Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You… you fill me up.”

• “Even when love isn’t enough…somehow it is.”

• “A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.”

• “Weird love’s better than no love at all.”

• “Love among the ruins… I’ll tell you something, my friend: Weird love’s better than no love at all.”

• “True love always happens in a flash.”

• “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, Hearts In Atlantis

• “It was like drowning, only from the inside out.” — Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

• “There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.” — Stephen King, Lisey’s Story

• “I loved you then and I love you know and I have loved you every second in between.”

• “When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask. ” — Stephen King

• “You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.” — Stephen King, Lisey’s Story: A Novel

• “A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman. ”

• “Pain is the biggest power of love. That’s what Wireman says.”

• “Love leaves scars.”

• "Love is like dying.”

• “Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.”

• “Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too."

So, these are 133 Stephen King quotes for you to read. Just from these quotes, you know that all his books are great and very interesting to read.

For you who already read all his books, it's time to open it again and enjoy the thrill one more time.