The Dark Half was written as an homage to Bachman. When Thad Beaumont, the author of unsuccessful literary fiction, is outed as "George Stark", the author of very successful crime novels, he and his wife stage a mock burial for his alter ego. This causes Stark to emerge as a physical entity that goes on a gruesome killing spree in traditional Stephen King fashion.

On June 19, 1999, King was walking on the shoulder of the road when he was hit from behind by a minivan and landed in a depression in the ground about 14 feet from the pavement. He was in the hospital until July 9th with a collapsed right lung, multiple fractures of his right leg, scalp lacerations and a broken hip. His leg bones were so shattered that doctors initially considered amputating his leg, but managed to stabilize the bones with an external fixator.

All three novels have elements of alien influence. Dreamcatchers is about an alien invasion, The Tommyknockers about the influence of a found alien craft on the local population, and Under the Dome centers on an alien experiment.

Due to his alcohol and drug addiction in the '80's, King barely remembers writing Cujo. In his book On Writing, he says "I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page."

Stephen King is a fan of The Ramones and quotes "Blitzkrieg Bop" in Pet Sematary. When the movie was produced, the band wrote and performed the title song which plays over the closing credits. The truck driver also listened to "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." In 2003, King wrote the liner notes for the tribute album We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to Ramones.

Since the first movie adaptation of Carrie in 1976, King has had many motion picture adaptations of his work. In November 2019, Business Insider wrote "by our count, 66 of King's 213 short stories, novels and novellas--a full 31%--have had some form of screen adaptation". At $327.5 million, the 2017 adaptation of It, was the highest-grossing horror movie ever.

Over the years, Stephen King has made his dissatisfaction with Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining quite clear. He has called Wendy "one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film" and insists the character of Jack Torrance has no arc. "When we first see Jack," King says, "he's crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change."

Affectionately referred to as Field of Screams, this Little League baseball field in Bangor was donated by the Kings to honor a local boy who lost his battle with cerebral palsy at age 14. Shawn T. Mansfield was the son of one of Stephen King's fellow coaches when he coached his own son's Little League team in 1989.

When King received a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Book Awards, the famous literary critic Harold Bloom had this to say: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis."

A self-confessed resident of "The People's Republic of Paranoia," King's long list of fears include the dark, snakes, rats, spiders, squishy things, psychotherapy, deformity, closed-in spaces, choking, death, flying, the number 13 and writer's block.