Bad Books Quotes

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Is it just me or is this like a bad TV sci-fi show?”
― John Ringo, When the Devil Dances

“All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma.”
― Kelly Armstrong

“Among some tossed-out books of my daughter's which I rescued...was one too awful to live. I returned it to the trash, resisting the urge to say a few parting words. All day long the thought of its mingling with chicken bones and olive pits nagged at me. Half a dozen times I removed it and replaced it, like an executioner with scruples about capital punishment. Finally I put it on a high shelf where I wouldn't have to see it. Life imprisonment.”
― Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books

“Writing a NYT bestseller was a delightful experience. But there are many books which are read by few that should be read and reread by many, as well as books bought by many that are hardly worth the ink.”
― Ron Brackin

“There is no friend so faithful as a good book. There is no worse robber than a bad book.”
― Italian proverb

“In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw's Railway Guide contains few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant

“Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“Sometimes trying to get to the Other Side would get you nowhere; sometimes you had to bet on the sid you were already on.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, Bad News

“Asking a decent editor to save this book would have been like asking a doctor to help a corpse that had fallen from the top of the Empire State Building.”
― John Niven

“We are lucky to die without having read some books, and without having heard some songs.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I slid into one of my black suits (why other colors existed was beyond me. Black was suitable for every occasion. The only exception I made was with gray sweatpants,
because those were practically considered lingerie for men) and wandered out of the master bedroom. I descended down the three marble steps to the living room. Black, sleek chandeliers dripped from the ceiling, and
upholstered black leather couches and recliners filled the room. The three
walls that weren’t floor-to-ceiling windows were bare, raw concrete. Everything about my place was dark, indulgent, and dangerous. An apartment carefully designed in the aesthetic of a modern douchebag.”
― L.J. Shen

“These two had the sexual chemistry of a tampon and a ketchup stain together. I couldn’t fathom how she didn’t see it. Madison was fire, and Ethan was . . . what the fuck was he, anyway?
Not water. Not earth. He was a shadow. A by-product of something else.”
― L.J. Shen, The Devil Wears Black

“Good books and bad books, like people, are part and parcel of life. Keep reading, books and people.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Debit Credit of Life: from the good books of accounts