Picking Books Quotes

The endless piles of genre fiction are the key to happiness. They're the key to picking out the things that actually make you happy in this world instead of the things that you're told are good for you. Ninety percent of everything you read is going to be crap one way or the other, so make sure it's the crap that makes you smile, and don't apologize for it.

pajiba.com guest post ~ Steven Lloyd Wilson

Laughter is healing and helpful and fun, and I see my role as an entertainer, and I want readers to leave my books smiling. ~ Gail Carriger

Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate. Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire....sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs...I live free as much as I can

-Freedom here has nothing to do with political libertyir a notion of rights or the licence to say whatever [Poggio] wished or the ability to go wherever [Poggio] chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world - and ensphering himself in a space apart. ~ Poggio Bracciolini

Man is a culture, nothing but a culture! Question your culture! Just like monkeys picking lice from their skin, get rid of the stupidities in your culture! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them. ~ Tara Bray Smith

I just have mysteries in all my books, I think, whether it's a boy investigating or a girl. I have an enduring fascination with mysteries of all kinds. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Myself and my two younger sisters and brother were paid for any chores, whether it was washing pop's car, sweeping the lawn or picking mangoes. ~ Marie Helvin

Where did the fiction go?
When did we begin to write off literature when its contents contained a character who remained true to themselves?
It's not my job as an author to create a character everyone likes, one who personifies perfection.
However…it is my job to be true to the character's personality, even when their attributes are dark, demented, and contrary to all we believe, or have been taught is right.
It is my job to show the reader, the good, bad, and the ugly of the protagonist's true nature that resides within them.
It is not my job to create a character everyone loves, adores, agrees, and sides with.
True literature remains true to the characters within the pages they inhabit; even when the readers may not understand or agree with their integrity or lack thereof.
As an author I share a bond with each and every character within the books I write. Though they are figments of my imagination, they are alive, and to them I will always remain true; even when the reader may, or may not understand.
©2015 Suzanne Steele ~ Suzanne Steele

You know what? I feel my book is kind of pointless. I didn't want to do a book, but rather than tell the same old stories over and over when my wife Angie and I are out at parties, I could just hand out a bunch of books, and she won't have to hear them ever again. ~ Al Jourgensen

I don't know if Marcus knows how important that moment was to me. How much he actually saved me from myself, from absolute despair. Maybe he does know and that's exactly what he was doing. He was like an angel who came into my life with his bus of books at exactly the right time, who whisked me away from a terrible place to a faraway land. ~ Cecelia Ahern

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations. ~ Bob Dylan

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn't until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me. ~ Osamu Dazai

I read books for exams at school, but only because I had to read them, and really didn't enjoy it one little bit! The only time I did enjoy it was when I was asked to read out loud in front of the class, as I then used it as an acting exercise! ~ Rachel Tucker

I collect books and I have some really, really old schoolbooks, and God is mentioned on every single page. ~ Dave Mustaine

The Books of Lamentations and Ezekiel are located on both ends of the West and the East on the circular zodiac of Dendera. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence. ~ Susan Sontag

Not to alarm you or anything, but I think you just made a deal with a Mexican gang. I've read Simone Elkeles books. I know how this whole garage as a front thing works. ~ Tammy Blackwell

Truth flows from universal law, not personal views. ~ John Agno

I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things. ~ Sean Durkin

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise. ~ Michael Ondaatje

You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid. ~ Bill Watterson

The system is not your friend. The system is not your enemy. The system is a retarded giant throwing wads of $100 bills and books of rules in random directions while shouting "LOOK AT ME! I'M HELPING! I'M HELPING!" Sometimes by luck you catch a wad of cash, and you think the system loves you. Other times by misfortune you get hit in the gut with a rulebook, and you think the system hates you. But either one is giving the system too much credit. ~ Scott Alexander

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

This is what you learn to see, when you sit alone in a forbidden place, reading faster than you can turn the pages You learn how very strange and lovely the world is and can be. How there is always more to find out, how there is nothing new under the sun - and that you are not alone, not really, not ever, with a book. ~ Ella Risbridger

A few days earlier, Adriana and I had been browsing books at the local library. I happened to turn around and look at her ... and that was it. The man who "loved to laugh" in Mary Poppins had nothing on us. ~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

The energy tasted like books, and I imagined we were still in the semipublic areas. ~ Kim Harrison

My books already threatened to take over my part of the room and keep on going ... whatever cargoes of words I could lay my hands on I gave safe harbor. ~ Ivan Doig

A WRINKLE IN TIME is one of my favorite books of all time. I've read it so often, I know it by heart. Meg Murry was my hero growing up. I wanted glasses and braces and my parents to stick me in an attic bedroom. And I so wanted to save Charles Wallace from IT. ~ Meg Cabot

For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title. ~ Donald Knuth

If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, it's that they honor working people. ~ Adriana Trigiani

Books are much better companions to me than people. ~ Rakesh Satyal

I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted. ~ Charles Darwin

SUPPORT LITERACY! A child who cannot read cannot text. ~ Ron Brackin

I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like. ~ Karen Marie Moning

It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture has been so exclusively one of books that it has grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression ~ F.O. Matthiessen

They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends - daring and knowledgable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them. ~ Cornelia Funke

Robin Wasserman is the author of several books, including 'Hacking Harvard,' 'Chasing Yesterday,' 'Seven Deadly Sins,' and her latest, 'Skinned.' ~ John Joseph Adams

We don't lock up books in this house," Philippe said, "only food, ale, and wine. Reading Herodotus or Aquinas seldom leads to bad behavior. ~ Deborah Harkness

Nobody ever gave away a trophy for reading books ~ Stephenie Meyer

Did I collect baseball cards? I've got 10 books full of plastic in my mother's house. All the Upper Decks, the Fleers, the Fleer Ultras. My grandfather brought me to the trade shows. I collected Marvel cards, too. ~ Action Bronson

If intellect could be acquired from books, nobody would have been more intellectual than a book monger. ~ Kunal Narayan Uniyal

There are only two kinds of math books: Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page. ~ Chen-Ning Yang

I don't normally have time to read, so when I go away I like to take a few books. ~ Paloma Faith