Stephen King Story Quotes

#1. And watch out for the blade, Constant Reader. It is a Stephen King story, after all.

Stephen King

#2. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.

Stephen King

#3. 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

#4. When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.

Stephen King

#5. Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.

Stephen King

#6. He pointed toward the silhouettes on the side of the [bathrooms] instead
black cutout man, black cutout woman. The man had his legs apart, the woman had hers together. Pretty much the story of the human race in sign language.

Stephen King

#7. At nineteen they can card you in the bars and tell you to get the fuck out, put your sorry act (and sorrier ass) back on the street, but they can't card you when you sit down to paint a picture, write a poem, or tell a story.

Stephen King

#8. And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there's a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.

Stephen King

#9. Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

Stephen King

#10. I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

Stephen King

#11. I didn't bother tellin her no made-up story, because she always sees through em and has since I was knee-high to a collie.

Stephen King

#12. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

Stephen King

#13. A short story is like a kiss in the dark.

Stephen King

#14. You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

Stephen King

#15. It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut - it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.

Stephen King

#16. When I start a story, I don't know where it's going.

Stephen King

#17. 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

#18. 1408 Film by Stephen King freak me out, the story also freak me out. But watching the film how is made, how much reverses were shown just terrified me. The ending was suprising!

Deyth Banger

#19. Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.

Stephen King

#20. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

Stephen King

#21. When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

Stephen King

#22. When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Stephen King

#23. It's also important to remember it's not about the setting, anyway - it's about the story, and it's always about the story.

Stephen King

#24. Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.

Stephen King

#25. As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

Stephen King

#26. Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story ... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Stephen King

#27. If [the characters] grow a lot, they begin to influence the course of the story instead of the other way around.

Stephen King

#28. The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

Stephen King

#29. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Stephen King

#30. I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens, this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.

Stephen King

#31. When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren't a character in some writer's story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe's head, or a momentary mote in God's eye?

Stephen King

#32. The woman who entered had the plump, matronly figure of the Good Gramma in a children's story and the beady eyes of a dick in a department store.

Stephen King

#33. I'm afraid of all kinds of things. I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing - that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.

Stephen King

#34. Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however ... that guy was onto something.

Stephen King

#35. The ghost story movie that scared me the most was The Changeling with George C. Scott. I think that's sometimes overlooked, but it's a wonderful piece of work.

Stephen King

#36. Stephen King is not a guy who keeps secrets the same goes and for Jeffery Deaver. But Jeffery Deaver creates characters and plays with them, Stephen King knows with who is playing, Jeffery Deaver just goes as how will happen, I think that and he doesn't know where the story lines will go.

Deyth Banger

#37. Like attending the masquerade ball in Poe's story about the Red Death. You know, 'Come on, everybody! Kick out the jams, have another glass of champagne, and ignore all those people dropping like flies.

Stephen King

#38. My job (and yours, if you decide this is a viable approach to storytelling) is to make sure these fictional folks behave in ways that will both help the story and seem reasonable to us, given what we know about them (and what we know about real life, of course).

Stephen King

#39. There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good stories seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.

Stephen King

#40. There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.

Stephen King

#41. Is he immortal do you think? Because I've seen much in my years, and heard rumors of much more, but never of a man or woman who lived forever."
" I don't think he needs to be immortal. I think all he needs to do is write the right story. Because some stories do live forever

Stephen King

#42. When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Stephen King

#43. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane.

Stephen King

#44. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.

Stephen King

#45. For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story ... or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.

Stephen King

#46. The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey.

Stephen King

#47. What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.

Stephen King

#48. I think it is harder to write a story that appeals to the intellect. But, when you tie onto one, you can do it quite deeply. It really depends on the type of idea you have to begin with.

Stephen King

#49. Insofar as story is concerned, and pleasure is concerned, there are not enough Stephen Kings to go around.

Stephen King

#50. It didn't scare him the way he had thought it would. There was still the unshakable, blind assurances that this organism Ray Garraty could not die. The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not Ray Garraty, star of that long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story.

Stephen King

#51. Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful?

Stephen King

#52. Pet Sematary 1 is one crazy story and film.

Deyth Banger

#53. I haven't been thinking at all, not really, I've just been following the steps. The recipe.
& this is like turning a page in the cookbook & finding the next one blank.

Stephen King

#54. The movie is actually from a book by Stephen King called The Body. When they were gonna put it to a motion picture, they found the story was a bit too strong for the title The Body, based on a young kid's movie. It would be too heavy.

Ben E. King

#55. What would writing this sort of story mean to others?

Stephen King

#56. I still think that of all the people doing top fiction today, John D. MacDonald is the best.He was my model as a kid. If there are people out there that want to write, all you need to do is read 20 of his stories to get an idea what it takes to make a story kick over.

Stephen King

#57. More than anything else I wanted to get inside my readers' defenses, wanted to rip them and ravish them and change them forever with nothing but story. And I felt I could do those things. I felt I had been made to do those things.

Stephen King

#58. I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me.

Stephen King

#59. The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.

Stephen King

#60. His head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing hand that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete.

Stephen King

#61. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

Stephen King

#62. As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger; or cross himself before eating. They had killed him. Taken his life. Stopped his breath and pulse. Save for dreams, the Pere was now gone from the story. Jake began to cry.

Stephen King

#63. You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

Stephen King

#64. The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

Stephen King

#65. It was that kind of story. The kind that's like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.

Stephen King

#66. Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.

Stephen King

#67. My manager got the script for 'Under the Dome,' and I read it and just fell in love with the character. I grew up on Stephen King, and I love his whole aesthetic of the classic American story with supernatural events happening, so it just made sense.

Alexander Koch

#68. Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world-not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses-at least a thousand, Scott
P.S. Everything the same. I love you.

Stephen King

#69. I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.

Stephen King

#70. Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world

Stephen King

#71. His story is simple, because simple is always best.

Stephen King

#72. Pay and the story rolls, .. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy.

Stephen King

#73. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

Stephen King

#74. President Obama awarded a National Medal of Arts to author Stephen King. You know, because if there's anyone who can relate to the story of a guy trapped in a mansion that's driving him insane, it's Obama.

Jimmy Fallon

#75. I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?" Some

Stephen King

#76. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right - as right as you can, anyway - it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you're very lucky ... more will want to do the former than the latter.

Stephen King

#77. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.

Stephen King

#78. Without story books is like a person with no soul.

Stephen King

#79. Diligence, word-lust, empathy equal growing objectivity and then what? Story. Story. Dammit, story!

Stephen King

#80. Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?

Stephen King

#81. The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker.

Stephen King

#82. No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Stephen King

#83. Then I got back to the house, and all I worried about was my story and the people in it
bags of bones which were putting on flesh daily.

Stephen King

#84. That's the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the least opportune moments.

Stephen King

#85. Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story

Stephen King

#86. I come to you and you see me whole,' he says. 'You love me all the way around the equator and not just for some story I wrote. When the door closes and the world's outside, we're eye to eye.

Stephen King