Stephen King Quotes

Stephen King is one of the best known writers living today. His horror fiction and thriller novels are extremely popular and quickly become bestsellers. King was a high school English teacher during his early career before he became established as a writer. He also has a frequently quoted book on writing, called On Writing.

Here is a collection of great quotes from Stephen King and his novels.

"The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants." - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

"Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win." - The Shining


"Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure." - Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption


"The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain." - It


IT cover


"We all float down here!" - Pennywise, It


"They'll float, they float, Georgie, and when you're down here with me, you'll float, too-" - Pennywise, It


If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die." - Christine


"I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!" - Ellie in Pet Sematary


"The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end." - Misery


Misery cover


"He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity." - Misery


"The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course." - Misery


"Tak is here now, and he speaks with the voice of the older age; with the voice of the unformed." - Desperation


"The scariest moment is always just before you start." - On Writing


On Writing by Stephen King book cover
Image: Scribner


"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." - On Writing


"I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read." - On Writing


"Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man." - The Tommyknockers


"The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary." - Cujo


"The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi." - Rolling Stone.


"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." - Bag of Bones