"You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves)

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
— Joseph Brodsky

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

"A man's silence is wonderful to listen to."
— Thomas Hardy

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"The ultimate luxury is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it."
— Michael Upchurch

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such and ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
— A.E. Newton

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"Wear the old coat and buy the new book."
— Austin Phelps

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods."
— Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds)

"Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are."
— Grant Morrison (The Invisibles Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution)

"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."
— Terry Pratchett (Eric)

"Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream. "
— Katherine Mansfield

"You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine."
— Thomas Traherne (Centuries Of Meditations)

"One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it."
— E.M. Forster

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Jack. I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Algernon. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing."
— Oscar Wilde

"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist."
— Nancy Springer

"Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."
— Charlaine Harris

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."
— Aldous Huxley

"'Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never would.'"
— Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)

"Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it"
— Samuel Johnson

"Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness."
— Lemony Snicket

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you."
— Jeremy Clarkson