“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“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 never lose it but simply wield it.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force—a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is “genius”), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“But on another, more potent level, the work of horror really is a dance—a moving, rhythmic search. And what it’s looking for is the place where you, the viewer or the reader, live at your most primitive level. The work of horror is not interested in the civilized furniture of our lives. Such a work dances through these rooms which we have fitted out one piece at a time, each piece expressing—we hope!—our socially acceptable and pleasantly enlightened character. It is in search of another place, a room which may sometimes resemble the secret den of a Victorian gentleman, sometimes the torture chamber of the Spanish Inquisition . . . but perhaps most frequently and most successfully, the simple and brutally plain hole of a Stone Age cave-dweller. Is horror art? On this second level, the work of horror can be nothing else; it achieves the level of art simply because it is looking for something beyond art, something that predates art: it is looking for what I would call phobic pressure points. The good horror tale will dance its way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of—as both Albert Camus and Billy Joel have pointed out. The Stranger makes us nervous . . . but we love to try on his face in secret.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“This Land is mostly white space on the map...which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown (and possible dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through it - and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“All of this was well meaning bullshit. But bullshit is still bullshit and will never be mistaken for McDonald's secret sauce.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“And, you know, I hope you have some fun with this book. Nosh and nibble at the corners or read the mother straight through, but enjoy. That's what it's for, as much as any of the novels. Maybe there will be something here to make you think or make you laugh or just make you mad. Any of those reactions would please me. Boredom, however, would be a bummer.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“…no one is exactly sure of what they mean on any given subject until they have written their thoughts down; I similarly believe that we have very little understanding of what we have thought until we have submitted those thoughts to others who are at least as intelligent as ourselves.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“The resulting scrambling to get the next big shiver and shake novel produced some really terrible books. As a further result, the wave had begun to withdraw by the mid 70s, and more traditional bestsellers began to re-appear: stories of sex, big business, sex, spies, gay sex, doctors in trouble, kinky sex, historical romances, sexy celebrities, war stories, and sex.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Time is not a river, as Einstein theorized - it's a big fucking buffalo herd that runs us down and eventually mashes us into the ground, dead and bleeding, with a hearing aid plugged into one ear and a colostomy bag instead of a .44 clapped on one leg.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Terror—what Hunter Thompson calls “fear and loathing”—often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal—if it hits you around the heart—then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Horror, terror, fear, panic: these are the emotions which drive wedges between us, split us off from the crowd, and make us alone. It is paradoxical that feelings and emotions we associate with the “mob instinct” should do this, but crowds are lonely places to be, we’re told, a fellowship with no love in it. The melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive, and they are melodies of disestablishment and disintegration . . . but another paradox is that the ritual outletting of these emotions seems to bring things back to a more stable and constructive state again.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Language is play to most writers, thoughts are play.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“„Ja, Leute, in Das letzte Gefecht hatte ich die Möglichkeit, die gesamte menschliche Rasse auszulöschen, und das hat Spaß gemacht!”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“„Schließlich ist der Romancier Gottes Lügner, und wenn er seine Arbeit gut macht, wenn er den Kopf und den Mut nicht verliert, kann er manchmal die Wahrheit finden, die im Zentrum der Lüge lebt.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Amerikanische Schriftsteller neigen eher dazu, die Sprache zu zerstückeln, als unsere britischen Vettern (doch ich behaupte entschieden, dass das englische Englisch wesentlich blutärmer als das amerikanische Englisch ist – viele englische Schriftsteller haben den unglücklichen Hang zu schwafeln; sie schwafeln in einem grammatikalisch einwandfreien Englisch, aber Schwafeln bleibt Schwafeln,”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Deutsch ist die Sprache der Erklärungen und Klarstellungen (aber es ist dennoch auch eine kalte Sprache; wenn viele Menschen Deutsch sprechen, dann hört sich das an, als würden in einer großen Fabrik Maschinen laufen).”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Katzen, diese amoralischen Revolverhelden der Tierwelt, sind wahrscheinlich die furchteinflößendsten Säugetiere,”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“weiß Gott, mit Englisch als Studienfach habe ich so viel Scheiße geschrieben, dass man das ganze östliche Texas damit düngen könnte -”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“Standen Sie jemals in einer Buchhandlung, haben sich verstohlen umgesehen und dann das Ende eines Buches von Agatha Christie aufgeschlagen, um zu sehen, wer es getan hat und wie? Haben Sie jemals das Ende eines Horrorromans aufgeschlagen, um festzustellen, ob der Held es aus der Dunkelheit ins Licht schafft? Wenn Sie das jemals getan haben, dann halte ich es für meine Pflicht, Ihnen drei schlichte Worte zu sagen: SCHÄMEN SIE SICH!”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
“„Dieser Faktor künstlerischer Vision ist so real und offensichtlich, dass ein Film selbst dann seine unbestreitbare Brillanz behält, wenn ein Regisseur wie Stanley Kubrick einen so ärgerlichen, perversen und enttäuschenden Film wie SHINING macht; sie ist einfach da.”
― Stephen King, quote from Danse Macabre
Stephen King
Born place: in Portland, Maine, The United States
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“The Shepherd laughed too. “I love doing preposterous things,” he replied. “Why, I don’t know anything more exhilarating and delightful than turning weakness into strength, and fear into faith, and that which has been marred into perfection. If there is one thing more than mother which I should enjoy doing at this moment it is turning a jellyfish into a mountain goat. That is my special work,” he added with the light of a great joy in his face. “Transforming things —to take Much-Afraid, for instance, and to transform her into—“ He broke off and then went on laughingly. “Well, we shall see later on what she finds herself transformed into.”
― Hannah Hurnard, quote from Hinds' Feet on High Places
“In a civilized country you can never tell.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“in until ten, not even on Mardi Gras nights. No one except the girl in the black silk dress, the thin little girl with the short, soft dark hair that fell in a curtain across her eyes. Christian always wanted to brush it away from her face, to feel it trickle through his fingers like rain. Tonight, as usual, she slipped in at nine-thirty and looked around for the friends who were never there. The wind blew the French Quarter in behind her, the night air rippling warm down Chartres Street as it slipped away toward the river, smelling of spice and fried oysters and whiskey and the dust of ancient bones stolen and violated.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Lost Souls
“Nice basket too. You can never have too many baskets, I’ve found.” She studies the basket, turning it round. “If you learn nothing else today, at least remember that.”
― Sally Green, quote from Half Bad
“You told me it was a mistake to fight the scarred warriors. They were the survivors.”
― Michael Scott, quote from The Necromancer
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