Stephen King

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.

In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.

Because things like this you can only ssay once. And you either get it wrong or right, it's the end either way, because it's too hard to ever try to say again.

It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

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

Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up

Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.

There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy——anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.

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

Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.

It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening, because they're not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet.

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

Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall.

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

For most of us, I think it's easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid.

It's best to be ruthless with the past.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.