"The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside."
Quote collection
Stephen King quotes (page 36 of 68)
1.4K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A place is yours when you know where all the roads go."
"The only religions I don't like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God."
"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."
"FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying"
"Sometimes loving eyes don't see what they don't want to see."
"I don't want to go to the heaven that I learned about when I was a kid. To me, it seems boring."
"But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years."
"There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in."
"When facts speak, the wise man listens."
"We're all going to die; I'm just trying to make it a little more interesting."
"I'd been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness."
"For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal."
"By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing."
"I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become."
"What I tell kids is don't get mad (about censorship) get even. Run, don't walk, to the first library you can find, and read what they're trying to keep out of your eyes. Read what they're trying to keep out of your brains. Because that's exactly what you need to know."
"Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It’s night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it’s blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it’s on, and so let’s talk very honestly about fear. Let’s talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madnessand... and perhaps over the edge."
"You should never trust a person who prays in public."
"A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it."
"There had never been a shortage of fools in the world"