Stephen King

"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

"Quiet people have the loudest minds."

"It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep."

"I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something"

"When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off."

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

"The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way."

"A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder."

"Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."

"Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze."

"Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame."

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once."

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

"you must not come lightly to the blank page."

"love is what moves the world, I've always thought...it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down...bring them low...and make them crawl..."

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar."

"As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?"

"I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss."

"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."