An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.

People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You've heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What's so sweet about that?

Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

It was strange how some of childhood's words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.

Look not long at what's offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.

My approach to revision hasn't changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt.

Small towns harbor small imaginations.

Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.

Nothing screws with memory like repetition.

A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.

When traitors are called heroes (or heroes traitors ...), dark times must have fallen.

It's hard to let go. Even when what you're holding onto is full of thorns, it's hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

Civilians are like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit.

Wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne.

Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

If a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.

If pigs had wings, bacon would be airborne.

There was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried.

No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver.... The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

If you think you've gone insane ... you're nuts.

Time's the thief of memory.

The stories we hear in childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

New knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries.

Life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they're precious.

In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake--perhaps one of suicidal proportions--to believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding the lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed.

Lawyers are fleas on the hide of human nature.

Nothing was certain; there were many strange twists and devious turns as one hopped down the overgrown bunnytrail of life.

How many unsuspected selves could a person have, hiding deep inside? She was beginning to think the number might be infinite.

City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

When teenagers aren’t turning like weathervanes in a high wind, they’re as stiff as Puritans.

STEPHEN KING, Full Dark, No Stars

Bad chances were better than no chances.

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.

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.

STEPHEN KING, The Stand

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

STEPHEN KING, Duma Key

If you liked being a teenager, there's something wrong with you.

STEPHEN KING, attributed, "The Adirondack Dreamer: Stephen King and I Agree"

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, The Stand

I don't have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.

STEPHEN KING, Different Seasons

Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

STEPHEN KING, Hearts in Atlantis

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

STEPHEN KING, The Shining

A slice of pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze.

STEPHEN KING, Firestarter

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

STEPHEN KING, Hearts in Atlantis

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

STEPHEN KING, 11/22/63

A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.

STEPHEN KING, The Dark Tower

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

STEPHEN KING, Bag of Bones

Semi-automatics have only two purposes. One is so owners can take them to the shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use -- their only other use -- is to kill people.

STEPHEN KING, attributed, The Theatrical Firearms Handbook

Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because "hobby" is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies "the arts."

STEPHEN KING, Night Shift

And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out.

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