"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
— George Plimpton

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics."
— Alan Moore

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know."
— Ambrose Bierce

"My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were. I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero's book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me--they looked almost comically nonaggressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree--but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children's parties--I daresay it would even give a merry toot--and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks."
— Bill Bryson

"I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"The one thing I remember about Christmas was that my father used to take me out in a boat about ten miles offshore on Christmas Day, and I used to have to swim back. Extraordinary. It was a ritual.
Mind you, that wasn't the hard part. The difficult bit was getting out of the sack."
— John Cleese

"It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own."
— Harry S. Truman

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left."
— Oscar Levant

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours"
— Alan Bennett (The History Boys: The Film)

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

"The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity."
— Margaret Nadauld

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

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
— Winston S. Churchill

"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see."
— Winston Churchill