But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty.” McVries’s voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. “It isn’t man or God. It’s something…in the brain.

She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.

He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.

The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis — especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he...

Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.

Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.

You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

Go then, there are other worlds than these.

—Me llamo Annie Wilkes, y soy…—Ya lo sé —la interrumpió—. Usted es mi fan número uno.

But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It...

The game was played hard in those days, Mr.King, with plenty of fuck-you.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

Any big hotels have got scandals,” he said. “Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack...

Here is one of the great truths of the human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.

I wouldn’t have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.

You’re dead, George. You just don’t have the sense to lie down.

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest...

Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power; great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically; mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and...

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The...

You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.

The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.

Money talks, bullshit walks.

Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that? […] Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can’t get over their past . . . That’s what ghosts are.

Deep inside her (ih her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. Tha man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying...

It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn’t believe but because they wouldn’t care.

They were close to the end of the beginning . . .

Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and...

Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn’t like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices...

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

He did it (listened) as the world’s most charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker’s face, making the other...

Rightly tired of the pain İ hear and feel, boss… where we’s comin from or goin to or why… If İ could end it, İ would. But İ can’t.

Some things were better lost than found.

The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.

He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

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.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however,...

Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.

…She helped me find my heart when I thought my heart was gone.

The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an outside evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy...

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years–if it ever did end–began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter...

He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn’t.

Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early — it’s summer...