Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stephen King

Quote by Stephen King

“There aren’t just 2 kinds of people, good and bad, like I thought when I was a kid who got most of his ideas on how people act from TV. There are 3. The third type of people go along to get along, like Deputy F.W.S. Malkin told me to do. Those are the most people in the world and I think they are gray people. They will not hurt you (at least on purpose) but they won’t help you much, either. They will say do what you want and God help you. I think in this world you have to help yourself.”

Quote by Stephen King

Work

Billy Summers

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Stephen King
Stephen King

Stephen King, born on September 21, 1947, is a renowned American author. His works primarily focus on horror, fantasy, and science fiction, and have won him a wide audience. King has received numerous literary awards in the United States, including the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the World Fantasy Award. more

You May Also Like

“Stanislaw Franciszek Czekaj was born on 10 August 1924. His early life was tough. His father, a veteran, died the following year, weakened by his incarceration in a Russian POW camp. His paternal grandparents had some property but when this was destroyed by arson Stan’s mother took him to live with her parents. They scraped a living on a smallholding with dirt floors and no electricity. He was still only fifteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. He vividly recalls the war arriving with ‘a terrible roar of aeroplanes and exploding bombs and machine gun fire’ as the Luftwaffe attacked the airfield near his village. Under German occupation, Stan and his neighbours suffered food shortages and a reign of terror by the Gestapo. Brutality, summary arrest, deportation and executions were rife and ‘everybody was afraid to talk in front of strangers in case there was an informer present and even in front of people that you knew’. When he was about seventeen, Stan joined the Polish Provisional Brigade (Brygasa Swietokrzyska) and adopted the alias Zwierz (Animal). Caught between two enemies, who then went to war with each other it was a perilous existence, fighting the Nazi occupiers, and then, once they were pushed out, resisting the returning Soviets. Stan’s participation in numerous operations, including the elimination of informers (described in sometimes-graphic detail: “How many people have you betrayed?” then I pulled the trigger pointing at his head’), resulted in a "Dead or alive" price being put on his head. Eventually he was forced to escape via Germany under the assumed name of Stanislaw Wozniak. He describes these experiences as a refugee, life in the DP (displaced person) camps, a stint in a Belgium coalmine and finally to Britain, where he was to spend the rest of his life.”