stephen-king

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
Stephen King, On Writing
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If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools)
to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
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Get busy living or get busy dying.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job
knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why
me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something
about you that pisses me off.
Stephen King, Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay
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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.
Stephen King
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Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.
Stephen King
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Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and
sometimes, they win.
Stephen King
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Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King
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Both Rowling and Meyer, theyre speaking directly to young
people. ... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific
writer and Stephenie Meyer cant write worth a darn. Shes not very
good.
Stephen King
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The most important things are the hardest to say.  They are the things
you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things
that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than
living size when they're brought out.  But it's more than that, isn't
it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret
heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love
to steal away.  And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only
to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what
you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you
almost cried while you were saying it.  That's the worst, I think.
When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for
want of an understanding ear.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King, On Writing
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The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Stephen King, On Writing
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If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others:
read a lot and write a lot.
Stephen King
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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.
Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: A Story from Different Seasons
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I think that we're all mentally ill.  Those of us outside the asylums
only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better
after all.
Stephen King
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If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.
Stephen King
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you can, you should, and if youre brave enough to start, you will.
Stephen King, On Writing
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A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is
like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
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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
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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.
Stephen King, Night Shift
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Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English
tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor
synonym.
Stephen King
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Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.
Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne
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That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Go then, there are other worlds than these.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.
Stephen King, Bag of Bones
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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.
Stephen King
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Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good
thing ever dies.
Stephen King
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There are books full of great writing that don't have very good
stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs
who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't
be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book
that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.
Stephen King
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Description begins in the writers imagination, but should finish in
the readers.
Stephen King, On Writing
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There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.
Stephen King
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Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King
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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
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Stephen King
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Nobody likes a clown at midnight
Stephen King
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Friends.
They arent any such thing as good friend or bad friend.
Maybe there are just friend.
People who stand by you when you're hurt and who helped you feel not so lonely.
Maybe there are worth being scared for and hoping for and living for.
Maybe worth dying for too.
If that what has to be.
No bad friends.
Only people you want.
Need to be with.
People who build their houses in your heart.
Stephen King
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We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Stephen King
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I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
I kill with my heart.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing
what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it
is to have a boyfriend.
Stephen King
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Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children.  It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
Stephen King
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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
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Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...
Stephen King
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Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Stephen King, On Writing
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The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
Stephen King
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You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
Stephen King
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In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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.
Stephen King
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We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
Stephen King, It
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When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
Stephen King
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Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Stephen King, The Shining
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I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. 
Stephen King
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Life isn't a support system for art.  It's the other way around.
Stephen King
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there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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When all else fails, give up and go to the library.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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Fault always lies in the same place:  with him weak enough to lay blame.
Stephen King
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The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.
Stephen King, It [Eso]
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Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.
Stephen King
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I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
Stephen King
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Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.
Stephen King
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If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him. 
Stephen King, On Writing
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Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Stephen King
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Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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
Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot
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The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Friends dont spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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I tend to scare myself.
Stephen King
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And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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It is the tale, not he who tells it.
Stephen King
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Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
Stephen King
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There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference.
Stephen King
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God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.
Stephen King
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The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows
Stephen King
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People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
Stephen King, The Stand
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So okay there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
Stephen King, On Writing
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It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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Hug and kiss whoever helped get you - financially, mentally, morally, emotionally - to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.
Stephen King
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Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.
Stephen King, Desperation
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High school isn't a very important place.  When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up.
Stephen King, Carrie
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You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Stephen King
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No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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the only mortal sin is giving up.
Stephen King
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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
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Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter. 
Stephen King, Duma Key
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Do you drink?"
"Of course,I just said I was a writer.
Stephen King
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If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.
Stephen King, Duma Key
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We're here to fuck shit up
Stephen King
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If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.
Stephen King
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Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Stephen King, On Writing
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I write to find out what I think.
Stephen King
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She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.
Stephen King, Under the Dome
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Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..
Stephen King, It
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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.
Stephen King
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Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair
Stephen King
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Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you.
Stephen King, Night Shift
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Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.
Stephen King, On Writing
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again. When you find something at which you have talent, you do that thing (what ever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes pop out of your head.
Stephen King
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Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands?  No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?
Stephen King
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Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
Stephen King, On Writing
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But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot
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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.
Stephen King, On Writing
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We all float down here!
Stephen King, It [Eso]
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Do it for joy and you can do it forever
Stephen King
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Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.
Stephen King
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A person can't change all at once.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Time's the thief of memory
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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A coward judges all he sees by what he is.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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Control the things you can control, maggot.  Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three
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When you write you tell yourself a story.  When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
Stephen King
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We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. Its not just a question of how-to, you see; its 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.
Stephen King, On Writing
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The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen
Stephen King, The Stand
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never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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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...
Stephen King
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Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. 
Stephen King, On Writing
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The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
Stephen King
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I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been.  It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.
Stephen King
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First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Am I weird?"

"Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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I have spent a good many years sincetoo many, I thinkbeing ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be.  No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
Stephen King, It
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Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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, Wizard and Glass
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I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.
Stephen King, Christine
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I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!
Stephen King, Needful Things
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The most important things are the hardest to say
Stephen King
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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
Stephen King, On Writing
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And people who dont dream, who dont have any kind of imaginative life, they must... they must go nuts. I cant imagine that.
Stephen King
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He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.
Stephen King, The Stand
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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.
Stephen King, Bag of Bones
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I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something
Stephen King
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Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Don't ask me silly questions
I won't play silly games
I'm just a simple choo choo train
And I'll always be the same.

I only want to race along
Beneath the bright blue sky
And be a happy choo choo train
Until the day I die.
Stephen King, The Waste Lands
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Sometimes dead is better
Stephen King, Pet Sematary
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If you dont have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?
Stephen King
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I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.
This is how we go on.
Stephen King
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Invitation to Dance-
Its a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.
But well dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.
May I have the pleasure?
Stephen King
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If you don't control your temper, your temper will control you.
Stephen King, Under the Dome
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Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isnt a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
Stephen King, Dark Tower Set
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People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.
Stephen King, Carrie
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It was like drowning, only from the inside out.
Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
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He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts
Stephen King, It
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I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. Thats 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book  something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?
Stephen King, On Writing
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I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.
Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
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Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?
Stephen King, On Writing
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Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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To write is human, to edit is divine.
Stephen King, On Writing
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FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.
Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
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When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
Stephen King, Joyland
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I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.
Stephen King
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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.
Stephen King, Joyland
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You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.
Stephen King, The Stand
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The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isnt very interesting.
Stephen King, On Writing
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She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. "But things could go wrong, so i want to tell you something while it's just the two of us, Eddie.  I want to tell you how much I love you." She spoke simply, with no drama.
I know you do," he said, "but I'll be damned if I know why."
Because you made me feel whole," she said.  "When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out."
Eddie laughed.
Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it.  You...Eddie, you fill me up.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.
Stephen King
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If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things. But that's not all. The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried; they are clues that could guide your enemies to a prize they would love to steal. It's hard and painful for you to talk about these things ... and then people just look at you strangely. They haven't understood what you've said at all, or why you almost cried while you were saying it.
Stephen King, The Body
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When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights.
Stephen King, Nightmares And Dreamscapes
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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.
Stephen King
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Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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, The Dark Tower
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It's a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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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.
Stephen King
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What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common....
Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three
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Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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I don't like people. They fuck me up.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King, On Writing
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If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
Stephen King
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He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.
Stephen King, It [Eso]
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A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
Stephen King
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If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.
Stephen King
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When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.
Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
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If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
Stephen King, On Writing
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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. 
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.
Stephen King, Lisey's Story
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Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Some things were better lost than found.
Stephen King, The Dead Zone
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Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Come on back and well see if you remember the simplest thing of all  how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.
Stephen King, It [Eso]
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It's a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.
Stephen King, Insomnia
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Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.
Stephen King
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Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King, On Writing
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God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.
Stephen King, Duma Key
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But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. [...] True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King, Carrie
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If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.
Stephen King, Under the Dome
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The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
Stephen King
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Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let's all walk a little faster
Stephen King, Desperation
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Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three
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I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
Stephen King, Bag of Bones
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Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
Stephen King
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you must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
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Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you...haven't you ever felt that way about music?'
Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.'
Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.'
Red: 'Forget?'
Andy: 'Forget that...there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.'
Red: 'What're you talking about?'
Andy: 'Hope.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended
Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
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This inhuman place makes human monsters.
Stephen King, The Shining
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Nora Roberts is cool.
Stephen King
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There was a lot they didnt 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
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Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
Stephen King, The Shining
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Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Stephen King, It
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I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Without story books is like a person with no soul.
Stephen King
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At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.
Stephen King
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She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time.  That's all.  When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns.  The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.
Stephen King, On Writing
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We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
Stephen King, Duma Key
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I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
Stephen King
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There is a muse, but hes not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. Hes a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think its fair? I think its fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but hes got inspiration. Its right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. Theres stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.
Stephen King, On Writing
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I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
Stephen King, Bag of Bones
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And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.
Stephen King, Pet Sematary
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Get busy living or get busy dying.....there ain't nothing inbetween
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
Stephen King, On Writing
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We never cease wanting what we want, whether it's good for us or not.
Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
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The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high... but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box abd cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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I have to remind myself that some birds arent meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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Time heals all wounds.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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The turtle couldn't help us.
Stephen King, It
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SSDD Same Shit Different Day
Stephen King, Dreamcatcher (Romans, Nouvelles, Recits (Domaine Etranger))
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...stupidity is one of the two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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What can be done when youre eleven can often never be done again.
Stephen King, It
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For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When youre done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Stephen King, On Writing
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In spite of the problems he was having  he was going on with his life.  There are thousands who dont or wont or cant  and plenty of them arent in prison  either.
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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If it's ka it'll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone
Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
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The past is obdurate.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?"

He stared at me, baffled. "Why the fuck would you do that?
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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Want your boat, Georgie?' Pennywise asked. 'I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.' He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.

Yes, sure,' George said, looking into the stormdrain.

And a balloon? Ive got red and green and yellow and blue...'

Do they float?'

Float?' The clowns grin widened. 'Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And theres cotton candy...'

George reached.

The clown seized his arm.

And George saw the clowns face change.
What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.

They float,' the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held Georges arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches.

They float,' it growled, 'they float, Georgie, and when youre down here with me, youll float, too'

George's shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly.

Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more.

Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street...and began to scream himself as George's body turned over in his hands. The left side of Georges slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.

The boys eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.
Stephen King, It
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Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women, Roland said.  Was He ever married? 
The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked.   No  he said,  but His girlfriend was a whore. 
 Well,  Roland said,  that's a start. 
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Words have weight.
Stephen King, On Writing
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Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.
Stephen King, The Stand
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Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King, On Writing
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The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
Stephen King, On Writing
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The mystery of the universe is not time but size.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. Its just how the world is.
Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
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Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.
Stephen King, It
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It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
Stephen King, On Writing
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When it was done and I went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude Ive ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I dont care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. Ive never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.
Stephen King, Lisey's Story
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Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. 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.
Stephen King, On Writing
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and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear
Stephen King, The Stand
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I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we re still alive.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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He was a romantic in his own harsh way...yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.
Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three
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The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.
Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
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The color white is the absence of memory.
Stephen King
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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.
Stephen King, The Tommyknockers
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No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.
Stephen King, It
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He knew as well as we in our own world do that the road to hell is paved with good intentions--but he also knew that, for human beings, good intentions are sometimes all there are.  Angels may be safe from damnation, but human beings are less fortunate things, and for them hell is always close.
Stephen King, The Eyes of the Dragon
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The medical definition ofmiracleis misdiagnosis.
Stephen King, Just After Sunset
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where the world ends is where you must begin
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Mister, we deal in lead.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
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He killed them with their love
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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A persons never too old for stories.  Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them. - Roland Deschain
Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole
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The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?"
Yes."
My Imagination."
I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."
Then you have a small imagination."
Roland and Eddie
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
Stephen King, Pet Sematary
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I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.
Stephen King
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Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries.  Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
Stephen King
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There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless.  That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
Stephen King, Doctor Sleep
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If you've ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you'll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.
Stephen King, 11/22/63
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oh shit it's shit
Stephen King, Different Seasons
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Time and tide wait for no man.
Stephen King
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If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness.  When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.
Stephen King, The Stand
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If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, Ill chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?
Stephen King
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Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.
Stephen King, Dreamcatcher (Romans, Nouvelles, Recits (Domaine Etranger))
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Weird love's better than no love at all.
Stephen King, The Green Mile
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The soil of a mans heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.
Stephen King, Pet Sematary
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It's offense you maybe can't live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think 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, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.
Stephen King, It
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Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Stephen King, Carrie
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You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.
Stephen King, The Dark Half
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And this wasnt lying, not really. It was leaving out.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
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What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign.
Stephen King, The Dark Tower
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Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King, On Writing
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One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.  This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.  The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.
Stephen King, On Writing
%
because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.
Stephen King, Duma Key
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The man in black smiled. "Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies?"

I thought we had been."

But the man in black persisted as if Roland hadn't spoken. "Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only equals speak the truth, that's my thought on't. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
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Some of this bookperhaps too muchhas been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of itand perhaps the best of itis a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. 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. 
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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