"There is no tyrant as merciless as pain."
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Stephen King quotes (page 41 of 68)
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"Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question."
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"The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important."
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"I believe that anyone using the phrase 'That's so cool' should have to stand in the corner."
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"I'm still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me."
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"I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground."
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"When I start a story, I don't know where it's going."
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"Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy."
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"The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky."
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"The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money."
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"Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all .... as long as you tell the truth."
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"I was sitting one day and thinking about cannibalism, because that's what guys like me do... and I thought, suppose a guy was washed up on a rocky island, how much of himself could he eat?"
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"The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent."
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"Writers must be fair and remember even bad guys (most of them, anyway) see themselves as good—they are the heroes of their own lives. Giving them a fair chance as characters can create some interesting shades of gray—and shades of gray are also a part of life."
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"There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate."
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"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."
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"You'll consider what you did wrong & bookend your reflections with hunger - no supper, no breakfast."
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"The poets continually and sometimes wilfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer."
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"Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be."
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"People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time."
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