Stephen King Quotes - Page 53

• I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.

  Stephen King

  Writing, College, Ideas

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• I wasn't a social drinker. I used to say that I didn't want to go to bars because they were full of assholes like me.

  Stephen King

  Bars, Want, Social

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• Money means I can support my family and still do what I love. Not very many people can say that in this world, and not many writers can say that.

  Stephen King

  Mean, People, Support

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Men, Adults

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• Showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don't want to do any of that.

  Stephen King

  People, Different, Want

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• I love music, and I can play a little. But anyone can see the difference between someone who's talented and someone that's not.

  Stephen King

  Play, Differences, Littles

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  5 Copy quote

• You've got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy.

  Stephen King

  Guitar, Tv Shows, Play

  Interview with Andy Greene, www.rollingstone.com. October 31, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew.

  Stephen King

  War, Dirty, White

  High Times Magazine Interview with Martha Thomases, John Robert Tebbel, October 1981.

  4 Copy quote

• When I knew I was going to be able to write full time, I wondered, "What's going to happen to the relationships within my family?" Are they going to change? Is it going to be the kind of deal where you say, "I can't take this! Get me out of here! I can't stand these screaming kids!" The way it turned out was, I was able to change the diapers okay, after I stuck the pin through my fingers a few times. I had a dawning realization that children are not particularly hard to deal with.

  Stephen King

  Children, Writing, Kids

  4 Copy quote

• We live in a society now where the sexual taboo for children has really passed by the wayside. Any nineyear-old can go into a 7-11 and check out the Playmate of the Month, but you don't want your kids to know about death. You don't want your kids to know about disfigurement. You don't want 'em to know about creepy things because it might warp their little minds.

  Stephen King

  Children, Kids, Creepy

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die.

  Stephen King

  Rap, Kids, Parent

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  4 Copy quote

• I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

  Stephen King

  Morning, Jobs, Fun

  4 Copy quote

• The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.

  Stephen King

  Memories, Lying, Kids

  5 Copy quote

• Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.

  Stephen King

  Sex, Book, Gay

  High Times Magazine Interview with Martha Thomases, John Robert Tebbel, October 1981.

  4 Copy quote

• When it comes to horror there's a strange need to analyze. When "evil children" fad happened, there was The Exorcist and The Other and The Omen. People would say, "What this really means is that Americans don't want to have kids anymore. They feel hostility towards their own children. They feel they're being tied down and dragged down." In fact, in most cases, what those books are about is nice children who are beset by forces beyond their control.

  Stephen King

  Children, Nice, Book

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of authority figures want to be good. I sense that, and yet at the same time I sense that authority, after a while, always leads to some kind of oppression. When the minority report comes in, what you do is run the minority out of town with a flaming cross. It's just the way things are.

  Stephen King

  Running, Minorities, Want

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  4 Copy quote

• We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we'll all need hooves. It's going to happen sooner or later, isn't it? You know it is.

  Stephen King

  Order, Needs, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Theres a constant struggle going on about how much will be illegal and how much you will be free to take. Can we open the pharmacies? Can we put Valium and Percodan and those sorts of things out on the shelves? I wouldn't take it. I don't know.

  Stephen King

  Struggle, Pharmacy, Valium

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  8 Copy quote

• For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

  Stephen King

  Struggle, California, Fire

  4 Copy quote

• If you were a real fascistic society and you had a vocal minority that was shouting, "Stop this, stop that, stop the other thing," what you would say is, "Let's give them all the drugs they want." In a lot of states, something very much like that happened. They lowered the drinking age to eighteen and said, "Get juiced."

  Stephen King

  Real, Drinking, Giving

  High Times Magazine Interview with Martha Thomases, John Robert Tebbel, October 1981.

  4 Copy quote

• My wife says, and I agree with her, that what would be really great for Maine would be to legalize dope completely and set up dope stores the way that there are state-run liquor stores. You could get your Acapulco gold or your whatever it happened to be - your Augusta gold or your Bangor gold. And people would come from all the other states to buy it, and there could be a state tax on it. Then everybody in Maine could have a Cadillac.

  Stephen King

  Running, Dope, People

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  4 Copy quote

• There were no horror movies or horror books to speak of in the '40s. I picked the '50s because that pretty well spans my life as an appreciator - as somebody who's been involved with this mass cult of horror, from radio and movies and Saturday matinees and books. In the '40s there really wasn't that much. People don't want to read about horrible things in horrible times. So, in the '40s, there was Val Lutin with The Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People and there wasn't much else.

  Stephen King

  Book, Cat, People

  4 Copy quote

• A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels.

  Stephen King

  Dream, Running, Real

  4 Copy quote

• Anywhere in New York, anywhere in the country, somewhere there's going to be a Coke sign. People identify with Coke. You can write a novel about New York and people from the country will read it if they feel that you've made them familiar with New York.

  Stephen King

  Country, New York, Writing

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  4 Copy quote

• By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

  Stephen King

  Writing, Order, Looks

  Stephen King, Tim Underwood, Chuck Miller (1988). “Bare bones: conversations on terror with Stephen King”, McGraw-Hill Companies

  4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Tabitha King

Stephen Hawking

Edgar Allan Poe

J. K. Rowling

Dean Koontz

H. P. Lovecraft

Stephenie Meyer

Ray Bradbury