"Me? I'm just a literary girl gone wrong. Slow with the tongue. Quick with the pen. Undeniably cute. But, on the whole, ill-equipped for the privilege of living."
— Koren Zailckas

"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)

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

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

"If a man's got talent and guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep."
— Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man)

"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

"It’s a wonderful body,” he’d whispered the next morning while she was still asleep. Not even the blue silk Loretta Caponi pajamas he’d brought back for her from Florence could disguise its lumpiness. But it was so gorgeously strong. She almost never got sick. She could outswim riptides and ski double diamonds. And even when a wave scraped her into the sand or a patch of ice threw her to the ground, she rarely bruised. He loved that body for taking care of her, for sheltering the one thing he couldn’t live without."
— Tanya Egan Gibson (How to Buy a Love of Reading)

"Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her pack. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere."
— E.L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler)

"The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers."
— Charles Baudelaire