"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

"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"Please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe- because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us know what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something no one else will tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly,nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. "Good" books can be pretty awful sometimes."
— Nick Hornby (Housekeeping vs. The Dirt)

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

"We are all children until our fathers die."
— Melissa Bank (The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing)

"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)

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"My ambition is handicapped by laziness"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"if you get married they think you're
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're
incomplete."
— Charles Bukowski

"dogs and angels are not
very far apart"
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry."
— Allen Ginsberg

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"
— Margaret Atwood

"No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubborness of life."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism "
— Dan Savage

"How can you tell somebody whose is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?"
— Dan Savage

"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"I can have oodles of charm when I want to."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors)

"And you snap ou of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody--who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens on pinches, only rolling abundance. That's how you acquire the resolution for survival that the upcoming years are about to demand. You don't give it. You earn it."
— Mary Karr (Cherry: A Memoir)

"Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Roster. You know what I'm saying?"
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"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)

"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!'"
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing."
— Miriam Toews (A Complicated Kindness)

"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)

"Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light. "
— Groucho Marx