Stephen King

"The Dixon boy hasn't had the tank, has he?" "Of course not." Donkey Kong looked vaguely offended at the very idea. "He's not a pink. Farthest thing from one. To risk damaging a BDNF as high as his would be insane. Or to risk damaging his abilities. Which would be unlikely but not impossible. Sigsby would have my head." "She won't and he goes in it today," Stackhouse said. "Dunk that little motherfucker until he thinks he's dead, and then dunk him some more." "Are you serious? He's valuable property! One of the highest TP-positives we've had in years!" "I don't care if he can walk on water and shoot electricity out of his asshole when he farts. Have the Greek do it as soon as he comes back on duty. He loves putting them in the tank. Tell Zeke not to kill him, I do understand his value, but I want him to have an experience he'll remember for as long as he can remember. Then take him to Back Half." "But Mrs. Sigsby-" "Mrs. Sigsby agrees completely." Both men swung around. She was standing in the door between the office and her private quarters. Stackhouse's first thought was that she looked as if she had seen a ghost, but that wasn't quite right. She looked as if she were a ghost. "Do it just the way he told you, Dan. If it damages his BDNF, so be it. He needs to pay."

"For a moment Luke stayed where he was, thinking that if he remained perfectly still and perfectly silent, the man would decide he'd been mistaken and go away. But that was childish thinking, and he was no longer a child. Not even close. So he crept out and tried to stand, but his legs were stiff and his head was light. He would have fallen over if the white guy hadn't grabbed him. "Holy shit, kid, who tore your ear off?""

"Luke had to use all his willpower to keep from drinking the whole sixteen-ounce bottle of water at a single go. He left a quarter of it, set it down, then snatched it up again and screwed on the cap. He thought if the train took a sudden yaw and it spilled, he would go insane. He gobbled the sausage biscuit in five snatching bites and chased it with another big swallow of water. He licked the grease from his palm, then took the water and the Hostess pie and crept back into his nest. For the first time since riding down the river in the S.S. Pokey and looking up at the stars, he felt that his life might be worth living. And although he did not exactly believe in God, having found the evidence against just slightly stronger than the evidence for, he prayed anyway, but not for himself. He prayed for the highly hypothetical higher power to bless the man who had called him outlaw and thrown that brown bag into the boxcar."

"Julia, I really think this is a mistake. It ought to be me." She faced him. "Say it again, and I'll haul off on you." She walked to the van. Denny Williams unrolled the side door for her. Mrs. Sigsby started to get in, then turned to Stackhouse. "And make sure Avery Dixon is well dunked and in Back Half by the time I return." "Donkey Kong doesn't like the idea." She gave him a terrifying smile. "Does it look like I care?"

"That's right, you tell Sheriff John. You-all need to be on your guard. They're apt to come locked and loaded. There's a town in Maine, Jerusalem's Lot, and you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars. If you could find any people, that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago. George Allman talks about that town all the time." "Got it." She went to the door, serape swishing, then turned. "You don't believe me, and I ain't a bit surprised. Why would I be? I been the town weirdo for years before you came, and if the Lord doesn't take me, I'll be the town weirdo years after you're gone." "Annie, I never-" "Hush." She stared at him fiercely from beneath her sombrero. "It's all right. But pay attention, now. I'm telling you... but he told me. That boy. So that's two of us, all right? And you remember what I said. They come in black cars."

"He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts."

"William "Stuttering Bill" Denbrough recites this in IT (1985), but the line is not originally King's, as is often believed. It is part of a tongue-twister that dates at least to its publication in "Exercises in Articulation" in The Dayspring (March 1874), p. 39:"

"Alvin Schwartz presents a slightly different version of the tongue-twister in his collection A Twister of Twists, A Tangler of Tongues (HarperTrophy, 1972, p. 80):"

"In his notes, Schwartz comments that the tongue-twister dates to 19th-century New England and that it was often referred to as "The Drunken Saylor.""

"I'm not saying that you will, right off the bat, with no author experience, make the kind of money Stephen King makes. Achieving that level of success can take literally months."

"(Name a book that made you want to write.) My uncle gave me Stephen King’s Pet Sematary one Christmas. I guess he was thinking: “It’s a bestseller, the girl likes to read, it has a cat on the cover…” I read it when everybody was asleep, probably passed out after the celebrations, and I was so scared I had to throw it away. But I picked it up again and went on reading. I remember thinking, wow, I’d really like to make people feel something so real as this under their skin. It’s clearly a novel about how scared he is to lose his family. I was 12 or 13 but you understand it at that age too; you never think it’s only about the supernatural. Everything I learned about blending reality and horror, I learned from Stephen King."

"If it feels like you’re being forced to honor and respect a demagogue and liar under penalty of … some bad thing, well, you’re not wrong. As Radley Balko said Monday, “we're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing, as has the lack of urgency [or] silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.” How is this happening? Consider the case of Stephen King. Yes, that Stephen King. Last week, on Twitter, the novelist quoted-tweeted remarks by Fox host Jesse Watters. “Charlie Kirk was not a ‘controversial’ or ‘polarizing’ man,” Watters said. “Charlie was a PATRIOT. THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction. Rest in peace, my friend.” It should be said first of all that this is a lie. Kirk was nothing but controversial and polarizing. That was his entire shtick. And that’s why Stephen King said: “He advocated for stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”"

"That Kirk did not explicitly advocate for the stoning of gays to death, in the strictest sense and syntax of those words, is therefore a distinction without a difference – unless, like Kirk, you’re a liar. In that case, the distinction between saying what you’re saying and not saying what you’re saying is important. If that collapses, so does your deception. As long as the distinction between what is said and what is intended to be understood is in place, it’s possible to bully people into silence. That’s what happened to Stephen King and others. They spoke the truth about Kirk – not the strict letter of it but the true spirit of it – but did not have the courage to stand by the truth after being accused of slander. And in the process of apologizing, they ended up affirming the lie, making it grow bigger, such that a USA Today story about King’s apology says that he “repeatedly apologized for a false accusation.” (After all, it must have been false if Stephen King apologized for it.)"