The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.
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Quotes by Stephen King
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Stephen King. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Stephen King
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.
A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
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.'
And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'
I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
You have to stay faithful to what you're working on.
Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.
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.
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
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