"I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England."
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"Get busy living or get busy dying."
— Stephen King (Shawshank Redemption)

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on earth tolerable. "
— Nick Hornby

"I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts."
— Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary)

"I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've neve met. I want to go on living even after my death!"
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - The Definitive Edition)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."
— Stephen King

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all."
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose DSY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself, choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?"
— Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)

"The truth will make you odd."
— Judy Blume

"The better you look, the more you see."
— Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
— Arthur Miller

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"My idea of good company. . . is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation."
— Jane Austen

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

"If I have to be alone I want to be by myself."
— Arthur Miller

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
— Nick Hornby

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

"How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"I love the relationship that anyone has with music...because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out...It's the best part of us probably..."
— Nick Hornby

"My mother began to go crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwhich, I am God' sort of way."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

" I lie to myself all the time, but I never believe me."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you..."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"
— Alice Sebold (Lucky)

"He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."
— Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

"As you wish."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

"When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other."
— Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)

"Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone."
— Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank)

"Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
"
— Anne Frank

""At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer."
"
— Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)

"There are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one."
— Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)

"Juno MacGuff: Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into? "
— Diablo Cody (Juno: The Shooting Script)