There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.

That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead.

Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!

One of the few things my father says when he’s had a few that I agree with is that kids don’t have much balls in this generation. Some of them are trying to start the...

Most kids don’t give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. who can’t play baseball or at least come in third in the...

for the Law, as we know, will befriend whomever pays it.

Not today. Instead of Wendy, I found myself thinking of Annie Ross and realizing I’d developed a small but powerful crush on her. The fact that nothing could come of it—she had to be ten...

[Prison Break is] one of the craziest, most unpredictable roller-coaster rides on TV today.

Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.

She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one…

One of life’s great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred pound Coke machine, one need worry about little else.

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.

People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.

If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at...

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 shit from a sitting position.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Viața nu e suport pentru artă. Invers stau lucrurile.

A change is as good as a rest.

Non lasciare che qualcuno cerchi di convincerti che i bambini non si portino dietro i loro rancori nella vita da adulti.

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...