Get busy living or get busy dying

This line is genuinely Stephen King's: it appears in his 1982 novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" (collected in Different Seasons), where the narrator Red records Andy Dufresne's reasoning as "It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying." Most people know it from Frank Darabont's celebrated 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, which phrases Andy's version slightly differently ("I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really…") and has Red echo it — and because Darabont wrote the screenplay, the line is sometimes credited to the movie rather than the book. But the crisp aphorism itself was on King's page more than a decade before the film, so the credit properly belongs to him as author, spoken by his fictional character. We found no earlier source and no competing author for the wording; the film merely amplified a sentence King had already written.