Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Stephen King, fully Stephen Edwin King

American Author of Contemporary Horror, Supernatural Fiction, Suspense, Science Fiction and Fantasy

"A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give."

"A broken spoon may be a fork in disguise."

"A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together-a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life."

"A change is as good as a rest."

"A cat won't curry favor even if it's in their best interests to do so. A cat can't be a hypocrite. If more preachers were like cats, this would be a more religious country."

"A coward judges all he sees by what he is."

"A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it."

"a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by."

"A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men."

"A critical assumption is sometimes made that [Grisham, Clancey, Crichton & myself] have access to some mystical vulgate that other (and often better) writers cannot find or will not deign to use. I doubt if this is true. Nor do I believe the contention of some popular novelists... that thier success is based on literary merit -- that the public understands true greatness in ways the tight-a**ed, consumed-by-jealousy literary establishment cannot. This idea is ridiculous, a product of vanity and insecurity."

"A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair. James, what?s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?' Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn?t it always? How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued. Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.' Seven? But James? that?s good, at least for you.' Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is? but I don?t know what order they go in!"

"A dimwit thinks nothing is funny unless it's mean."

"A good reputation is something that must be earned, yet can never be bought."

"A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion."

"A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it."

"A kid of your age---any kid---could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?"

"A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID."

"A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway."

"A lot of authority figures want to be good. I sense that, and yet at the same time I sense that authority, after a while, always leads to some kind of oppression. When the minority report comes in, what you do is run the minority out of town with a flaming cross. It's just the way things are."

"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."

"A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die."

"A library is a place where you can live a thousand lives. So why are you waiting when you could be living? Visit your library today."

"A life without love is like a tree without fruit."

"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."

"A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them."

"A man who lies about beer makes enemies."

"A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures."

"A person can't change all at once."

"A person can go along quite a while if they get a good day every once and again."

"A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation."

"A man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man."

"A place is yours when you know where all the roads go."

"A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either throw those relics out or took them to Goodwill."

"A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless."

"A person could see a lot without ever leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools."

"A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you."

"A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless."

"A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels."

"A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes."

"A slice of pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze."

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"A short story is like a kiss in the dark."

"A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."

"A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman."

"A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around."

"A stupid man is more prone to cabin fever just as he's more prone to shoot someone over a card game or commit a spur-of-the-moment robbery. He gets bored. When the snow comes and there's nothing to do but watch TV or play solitaire and cheat when he can't get all the aces out. Nothing to do but bitch at his wife and nag at the kids and drink."

"A successful novel should interrupt the reader?s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog."

"About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little; it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are."

"Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe."

"Above all else, be consistent."