A bad song for a night such as this, may hap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had.

— Stephen King

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

— Stephen King

About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.

— Stephen King

A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn't belong in a smart people's club.

— Stephen King

A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.

— Stephen King

A change is as good as a rest.

— Stephen King

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.

— Stephen King

A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.

— Stephen King

A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.

— Stephen King

A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away.

— Stephen King