"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
— Logan Pearsall Smith

"The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books."
— George Gissing

"We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming."
— John Fante (Ask the Dust)

"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

"Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness"
— Italo Svevo

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself."
— John Green

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"La obras de arte se dividen en dos categorías: las que me gustan y las que no me gustan. No conozco ningún otro criterio."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street."
— Virginia Woolf

"I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of those who-do-things. I don't do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails. But I don't even do that anymore."
— Dorothy Parker

"My mistakes are my life."
— Samuel Beckett

"En mi corazón hay una paz de angustia, y mi sosiego está hecho de resignación."
— Fernando Pessoa (Libro del desasosiego)

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."
— Franz Kafka

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

""A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.""
— Tobias Wolff

"Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?"
— Clarice Lispector (A Hora Da Estrela)

"The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

"I think I've discovered the secret of life -- you just hang around until you get used to it."
— Charles M. Schulz

"No era feliz, no lo había sido nunca. ¿De dónde venía, pues, aquella insuficiencia, de la vida, aquella instantánea podredumbre de las cosas en que se apoyaba?[...]. Cada sonrisa disimulaba un bostezo de aburrimiento, cada alegría una maldición, cada placer su propio asco, y los mejores besos no dejaban sobre los labios más que un delirio irrealizable de una voluptuosidad más alta."
— Gustave Flaubert (MADAME BOVARY)

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives 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

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"The excellence of every Art is its intensity."
— John Keats (Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats)

"The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities."
— Sophocles

"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)

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

"It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself."
— William Saroyan

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson