Quotes
58 Stephen King Quotes on Writing, Fear, and Books
Stephen King has published more than sixty novels and something north of two hundred short stories, and somewhere in there he also wrote the best book about writing that a working novelist has ever produced. That combination is why he gets quoted more than almost any living author: he is a horror writer with an unusually clear prose style and a complete absence of pretension about what he does for a living.
Every line below is real, and every one is attributed to its source where the source is certain. Where a quote is genuinely King's but has circulated for years without a reliable citation to a specific book, we've attributed it to him alone rather than guess — which is more than most quote pages do. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is borrowed from a film adaptation. That last part matters more than you'd think: several of the most-shared “Stephen King quotes” online were written by screenwriters.
On Writing: The Craft
Almost everything King has said about writing comes from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, published in 2000 and written in two halves — the first before June 1999, when he was struck by a van while walking near his home in Maine, and the second during a painful recovery that he describes in the book. It's short, unsentimental, and full of instructions specific enough to actually follow.
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.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
The adverb is not your friend.
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.
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.
Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.
The best form of dialogue attribution is said.
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
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.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
You must not come lightly to the blank page.
Writing is refined thinking.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
On the work behind the work
The most useful thing about King's advice is how little of it is about talent. He is emphatic, repeatedly, that the difference between people who write books and people who don't is almost entirely a matter of showing up.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea.
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.
Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.
Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.
Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
On Books and Reading
King reads roughly seventy or eighty books a year and has never made any secret of considering that the non-negotiable half of the job. The most famous line here — the portable magic one — has been printed on more tote bags than any sentence he wrote about a clown.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Reading is the creative center of a writer's life.
Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
On Fear, Horror, and Monsters
King's nonfiction survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre (1981), is where he laid out his working theory of fear — including the three-tier hierarchy that horror writers have been arguing about ever since.
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 I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Terror… often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.
The hierarchy in that first quote is worth sitting with, because it explains his whole career. Terror is the dread before you see the thing. Horror is the moment you see it. The gross-out is what's left when neither of the first two worked. King's argument is that a writer should aim for the top of that ladder and take whatever rung they can reach — and he's honest that he reaches for the bottom one when he has to.
Lines From the Novels
These are the sentences readers actually carry around. A note before you scroll: “Here's Johnny” and “Wendy, darling, light of my life” are Kubrick, not King — neither appears in The Shining, and King has spent forty-five years pointing that out. Everything below is from the books.
IT
We all float down here.
Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely.
Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too.
The Shining and Pet Sematary
Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters.
Sometimes dead is better.
The Dark Tower
The opening sentence of The Gunslinger is one of the most famous first lines in American genre fiction, and King wrote it when he was nineteen.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
There will be water if God wills it.
Time is a face on the water.
The Stand, 11/22/63, and The Green Mile
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.”
The past is obdurate.
Life turns on a dime.
I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain.
Different Seasons
The collection that produced The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil — and the strongest argument that King was never only a horror writer.
Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
'Salem's Lot and Misery
Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.
The town knew about darkness.
Writers remember everything… especially the hurts.
Where to Start If These Made You Want to Read Him
Fifty-eight quotes is a strange way to meet a writer whose real gift is momentum over five hundred pages. If you want the actual experience, three entry points work best.
For the writing advice, go straight to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It's under 300 pages, it's the source of most of what's on this page, and it's genuinely useful whether or not you ever write a word of fiction.
For the fiction, Different Seasons is the least intimidating door in — four novellas, only one of them supernatural, and two of them became films you've probably already seen. If you want the horror at full strength, The Shining and Pet Sematary are the two most efficient. And if you want to understand why people talk about King the way they do, it's IT — over a thousand pages, and the childhood sections are among the best writing about being eleven years old in any American novel.
We've ranked the whole catalog in the best Stephen King books of all time if you want a fuller map.
Stephen King Quotes FAQ
What is Stephen King's most famous quote?
Among readers, “Books are a uniquely portable magic” from On Writing. Among horror fans, “We all float down here” from IT. Among writers, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
What book are most Stephen King writing quotes from?
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), half memoir and half toolbox, written partly during his recovery from being struck by a van in 1999.
Did Stephen King write “Here's Johnny”?
No. That and “Wendy, darling, light of my life” are from Kubrick's 1980 film and appear nowhere in the novel. A surprising number of quotes attributed to King online are screenwriters' lines.
What did Stephen King say about adverbs?
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs” and “The adverb is not your friend,” both from On Writing. His point is that adverbs are usually a writer hedging — not trusting the verb, the dialogue, or the reader.
How many books has Stephen King written?
More than sixty novels, including those published as Richard Bachman, plus multiple short-story collections and several works of nonfiction. He has been publishing continuously since Carrie in 1974.
More quotes and lists
The through-line in all of these is the same: King treats writing as a job you do on a schedule and fear as a thing worth taking seriously. That's an unglamorous philosophy, and it produced sixty-odd books. Browse all our reading guides for more.
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