Stephen Edwin King (born 1947-09-21) is an American author, screenwriter, musician, columnist, actor, film producer and director. A 2003 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Awards, King's books have been enormously successful, and are often featured on bestseller lists.

See also: Carrie, Night Shift, 'Salem's Lot, The Dark Tower (series), Danse Macabre, On Writing, The Stand (miniseries)

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• I work until beer o'clock.
  • On his 9 to 5 writing day, as quoted in Time (October 6, 1986)

• French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
  • Time (October 6, 1986)

• The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
  • Needful Things (1991)

• Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel? ...Sometimes he makes us live.
  • Desperation (1996)

• This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. 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.
  • Bag of Bones (1998)

• Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.
  • Hearts in Atlantis (1999)

• The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants.
  • The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)

• 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".
  • Storm of the Century (1999)

• Born in Lust, Turn to Dust. Born in Sin, Come on In
  • Storm of the Century (1999)

• I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex -- a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.
  • The Politics of Limited Editions

• It takes a son of a bitch to change a habit.
  • Cat's Eye

• President Clinton has made a few feeble swipes at addressing this issue [school violence], but one can only gape at the unintentionally comic spectacle of this man chastising the gun-lobby and America's love of violent movies while he rains bombs on Yugoslavia, where at least twenty noncombatants have already died for every innocent student at Columbine High. It is like listening to a man with a crack-pipe in his hand lecture children about the evils of drugs.
  • Keynote Address, Vermont Library Conference, VEMA Annual Meeting, 1999-05-26

• I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I'm very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we're living in, it's very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that's running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause.
  • Marks, John, "Stephen King's God trip", Salon.com, 2008-10-23. URL accessed on 2008-10-23.

• If I know anything, I know scary. And giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying. Thankfully, this national nightmare is one we can end.
  • "My Book About A Really Mean Car That Kills People Was Pretty Scary. But Not As Scary As Those Scary Republicans", The Gaggle, Newsweek (2006-10-24)

• YouTube is very addictive. I refused to put it on my favorite places because it's too easy to go there.
  • Stephen King Visits YouTube - Part 1

Rage (1977)

• I don't think there was anything in my brain right then except the usual background static -- the kind you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.

• You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that.

• There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even...I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.

• "This," I said pleasantly, "is known as getting it on."

• Susan Brooks was one of those girls who never say anything unless called upon, the ones the teachers always have to ask to speak up, please. A very studious, very serious girl. A rather pretty but not terribly bright girl -- the kind who isn't allowed to give up and take the general or the commercial courses, because she had a terribly bright older brother or older sister, and the teachers expect comparable things from her. In fine, one of those girls who are holding the dirty end of the stick with as much good grace and manners as they can muster. Usually they marry truck drivers and move to the West Coast, where they have kitchen nooks with Formica counters -- and they write letters to the Folks Back East as seldom as they can get away with. They make quiet, successful lives for themselves and grow prettier as the shadow of the bright older brother or sister falls away from them.

• My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic, the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won't come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he's going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God's gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it's really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea... But it also means that no one will believe you if it's true. You're the little boy who cried wolf. And for me it's true...I don't think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he'd probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good.

• That's what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity. It's a bull's job and they go to school to learn how, and their courses are all variations on a theme: Slipping It to the Psychos for Fun and Profit, Mostly Profit. And if you find yourself someday lying on that great analyst's couch where so many have lain before you, I'd ask you to remember one thing: When you get sanity by stud, the child always looks like the father. And they have a very high suicide rate.

• And then a funny thing happened to me...except when I think about it, it wasn't very funny at all. There must be a line in all of us, a very clear one, just like the line that divides the light side of a planet from the dark. I think they call that line the terminator. That's a very good word for it. Because at that moment I was freaking out, and at the next I was as cool as a cucumber.

• For no reason at all, I thought of New Year's Eve, when all those people crowd into Times Square and scream like jackals as the lighted ball slides down the pole, ready to shed its thin party glare on three hundred and sixty-five new days in this best of all possible worlds. I have always wondered what it would be like to be caught in one of those crowds, screaming and not able to hear your own voice, your individuality momentarily wiped out and replaced with the blind empathic overslop of the crowd's lurching, angry anticipation, hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder with no one in particular.

The Stand (1978)

• He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?

• You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

• Afterward Larry felt as if he had been through a long pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with a low-grade poison gas.
  • Larry Underwood, Page 36

• Starkey put his fingers under the man's chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man's eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said, ANY QUESTIONS?
  • Page 170

• Did you know that Dairy Queen ice cream is mostly bubbles?
  • Frannie

• M-O-O-N, that spells ILLEGAL!
  • Tom Cullen

• There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.
  • The Stand (Uncut), Chapter 55 p. 799 (1990)

• When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."
  • The Stand (Uncut), Preface (part 2) (1990)

• 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.
  • Glen Bateman

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