"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact that you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take and even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with it’s teeth or are they nails?, don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms – you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book – you won’t have time to even scream.

Don’t look.

I didn’t."
— Mark Z. Danielewski

"Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words."
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."
— Jon Stewart

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it, and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights.

And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else.

"
— Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,' he said. 'Have you thought of going into teaching?'"
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella."
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."
— Neil Gaiman

"The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow."
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope."
— Stephen King

"A book worth reading is worth owning."
— John Ruskin

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface."
— Virginia Woolf

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"said Jack matter-of-factly. "I'm a man. We're made to think more quickly."

...Aven swung her fist and clocked Jack square on the chin, knocking him backward into the balloon, which was still under repair.

...Aven rubbed her knuckles and looked at the others. "Sorry about that. I might have stopped myself from hitting him, but I didn't think of it quickly enough.""
— James A. Owen

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"There's some heinous fuckery goin' on mon."
— Christopher Moore (Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings)

"Only cops and vampires have to have an invitation to enter."
— Christopher Moore

"The music coming from inside sounded like robots fucking. And complaining about it. In rhythmic monotone. European robots."
— Christopher Moore (You Suck: A Love Story)

"You sure about this writer thing son?"
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

"I've seen more intelligence in the crotch lice of harem whores."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"No one knows why, but second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture."
— Christopher Moore (The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0)

"Stephanie Meyers: Her vampires are sparkly. Which I think we can all agree is wrong."
— Christopher Moore

"Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them...and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen."
— Janette Rallison

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island." "
— Anna Quindlen

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live the loves I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath