Stephen King
Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.Collection: Beautiful
It's up to men to build things ... it's up to God to blow them down.Collection: Blow
A slice of pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze.Collection: Kissing
Terror?often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.Collection: Arise
I believe there is an unseen world all around us.Collection: Believe
Did you know that Dairy Queen ice cream is mostly bubbles?Collection: Queens
Some things it don't pay to be curious about.Collection: Pay
Money can't buy off the lightning.Collection: Lightning
...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.Collection: Children
A broken spoon may be a fork in disguise.Collection: Broken
I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.Collection: Night
THE THREE is really wonderful. A mix of Michael Crichton and Shirley Jackson, hard to put down and vastly entertaining.Collection: Three
Stories are like relics, part of an undiscovered preexisting world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.Collection: Jobs
I've killed enough of the world's trees.Collection: Tree
A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill.Collection: Years
We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.Collection: Real
These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.Collection: Country
Legends grow beards, and twenty-three years is plenty of time to grow a long one.Collection: Years
I started off thinking Eminem was a flash in the pan, a kind of hip-hop Hanson brother. How wrong I was. Recovery is sometimes funny, sometimes terrible, always painfully honest. The matching of Eminem and Rihanna on "Love the Way You Lie" is pure genius. "Not Afraid" is pretty great too.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Home
Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.Collection: Dream
The great thing about writing is that...you can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.Collection: Believe
Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.Collection: Writing
American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm.Collection: Charm
...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.Collection: Friday
...stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position.Collection: Ideas
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?Collection: Dream
Even when love isn't enough...somehow it is.Collection: Love
Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.Collection: Coffee
Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.Collection: Cat
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.Collection: Writing
Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.Collection: Believe
The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.Collection: Pain
A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.Collection: Men
A man who lies about beer makes enemies.Collection: Funny
It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.Collection: Kissing
I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff - movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album - I have my Mac.Collection: Tv Shows
I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.Collection: Hurt
Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.Collection: Running
The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Writing
Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.Collection: Art
The rope by which the great blocks of taxes are attached to any citizenry is simple loyalty.Collection: Loyalty
But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.Collection: Kings
A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.Collection: Eye
A short story is like a kiss in the dark.Collection: Dark
Of all the questions I'm asked, the most difficult is, "How does it feel to be famous?" Since I'm not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism....I've got three kids and I've changed all their diapers, and when it's two o'clock in the morning and you're changing something that's sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don't feel famous.Collection: Morning
...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.Collection: Book
Whenever I publish a book, I feel like a trapper caught by the Iroquois. They're all lined up with Tomahawks, and the idea is to run through with your head down, and everybody gets to take a swing. They hit you in the head, the back, the ass, and the balls.Collection: Running