Stephen King Quotes

Eighty per cent of my output is 'Mallory clowns on the Western canon,' and I'm happy to be that person.

I think everyone is born with humor, but your life can beat it out of you, sadly, or you can be lucky enough to grow up in it.

We have to be able to poke fun at ourselves.

Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?" "The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.

Some men are, in regard to ridicule, like tin-roofed buildings in regard to hail: all that hits them bounds rattling off; not a stone goes through.

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change.

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously.

You'll never do anything creative, innovative or world changing if you fear criticism. Pioneers are easy targets for arrows!

Somehow the pantsless gay man is not bringing the romance, Scott.

It's hard to look too grand when you're led by someone who looks like a pudding with legs.

Do you get the feeling with Sarah Palin, in high school, she was voted least likely to write a book and most likely to burn one?

I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani. I said every sentence Rudy utters has a noun, a verb, and 9/11 in it. I was wrong. He called me to tell me after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an Amen in every sentence he says too.

On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.

I have seen lampoons of my work. And I have really enjoyed them. But I would never do another version of The Exorcist.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever" he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

Syntax must be bad, having sin and tax in it.

The concept of marriage must have been thought up by an unimaginative pig.

The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.