Top 100 Quotes About Bad Books
#1. That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.
Gore Vidal
#2. Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.
David Frum
#3. It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well.
Antonia Fraser
#4. Especially beware of bad books; and for nothing in the world let your soul be carried away by certain writings which weak brains admire, because of some vain subtleties which they find therein.
Francis De Sales
#5. Only bad books have good endings.
If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end.
Pseudonymous Bosch
#6. Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored
Vikram Seth
#7. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
Evelyn Waugh
#8. Reading good books spoils you for enjoying bad books.
Annie Barrows
#9. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
Kira Hawke
#10. Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Stephen Vizinczey
#11. Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
Joe Haldeman
#12. There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
Anatole France
#13. There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.
Christopher Hampton
#14. Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.
Remy De Gourmont
#15. Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.
Patricia Briggs
#16. Thou shalt not might' reach the head but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them.
Philip Pullman
#18. I think writing a book with film in mind is a way to write a really bad books. You can usually tell those books that are packaged to become films.
Charlize Theron
#19. The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.
Leo Tolstoy
#20. 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
#21. It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.
Margaret Atwood
#22. There are no bad books.
Reading is reading and the mind will benefit from the exercise regardless of the content.
Kade Cook
#24. Anyone who tells you her life is like a book has either been reading some bad books or is not being straight with you or herself about her life.
M.J. Andersen
#25. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
Stephen King
#26. A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.
Joseph Roth
#27. One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#29. It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.
Voltaire
#30. It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
William, Saroyan
#31. I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people
men and women alike
could go on to happier, more productive lives.
Richard Ford
#33. I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
John Green
#34. For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life.
Mordecai Richler
#35. There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
#36. I love books. If they are good books, I love them even more. But even if they are bad books, I still love them.
Hugo Chavez
#37. Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.
Rene Descartes
#38. Whatever you read, read the Bible first. Beware of bad books: there are plenty in this day. Take heed what you read.
J.C. Ryle
#39. I don't believe in bad books. There's either not enough editing, imagination, or explanations. Triple-check everything.
B.A. Gabrielle
#40. I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
- The Ghost, Robert Harris.
Robert Harris
#41. Life is too short to read bad books or drink bad wine.
Joy Daniels
#42. I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several bad books.
Cara Rosalie Olsen
#43. Dear Reader, may God protect you from bad books, police and nagging, moon-faced, fair-haired women.
Francisco De Quevedo
#44. Never read books you aren't sure about . . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?
John Bosco
#45. I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.
Anthony Minghella
#46. I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Carlos Fuentes
#47. Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
Gunter Grass
#48. Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
Lionel Shriver
#49. I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.
Roger Angell
#50. Life is too short to waste your time with bad books.
Michael Kruger
#51. There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
Norton Juster
#52. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
#53. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles De Lint
#54. People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad.
Charles Yu
#55. if there are books perhaps it won't be all that bad.
Jo Walton
#56. I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
Maj Sjowall
#57. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.
William Hazlitt
#58. I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It's not so bad. I am really lucky.
Gene Wilder
#59. Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.
Bill Nye
#60. Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction. And yes, I think that's bad.
Jason Merkoski
#61. You want war??
...
Out there you can find books, films about the war how brutal is it. If you disire for more... it sounds like you are cruel, so far I can understand it you are the bad guy, aren't you?
Deyth Banger
#62. They were daughters of the sky. Luck belonged to them - never bad, often good, sometimes hard.
C.J. Milbrandt
#63. History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.
Mario Van Peebles
#64. In books, often the bad guys have a story too, and sometimes it is just as tragic as the hero's.
Jennifer Megan Varnadore
#65. He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.
Neil Gaiman
#66. My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Sherman Alexie
#67. Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]
Isaac Asimov
#68. Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.
Mark Haddon
#69. Now whither does THIS trail lead?" Kaa's voice was gentler. "Not a moon since there was a Manling with a knife threw stones at my head and called me bad little tree-cat names, because I lay asleep in the open.
Rudyard Kipling
#70. I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.
Siri Hustvedt
#71. In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
C.S. Lewis
#72. She looked at her shelves, filled with books in which the bad stuff that happened to people was caused by things like witches who lured people into the woods. In a weird way, the world seemed to make more sense that way.
Anne Ursu
#73. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#74. Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.
Jenny Colgan
#75. Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it.
Alexander McCall Smith
#76. Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it
William Meikle
#77. There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others ...
Chris Geiger
#78. My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'
Pete Hamill
#79. I was really sorry to hear that her parents split up. But she said it wasn't that bad. She actually said it happened a lot. She said the good thing was they had plenty of extra body parts around the house to put them back together.
Herobrine Books
#80. My writing legacy would be my true depiction of life; exploring the entire colorful spectrum of people, both good and bad, capturing it in words and exposing it to all cultures in a respectful manner - In a way that would stand the test of time.
Diane Martin
#81. Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
Marco Roth
#82. Prepare yourself for some bad news: Ronald Reagan's library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He hadn't finished coloring either one of them.
Gore Vidal
#83. We do not so much want books for good people, as books which will make bad ones better.
Hannah More
#84. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children ... do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
Neil Gaiman
#85. What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
#86. But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.
Matt De La Pena
#87. The supper was like most Parisian suppers: silence at first, then a burst of unintelligible chatter, then witticisms that were mostly vapid, false rumors, bad reasonings, a little politics and a great deal of slander; they even spoke about new books.
Voltaire
#88. It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a pious thing to collect them.
Frederick Locker-Lampson
#89. Every time I have a bad day, I'll just find a corner, bring out my book and then everything starts to feel better.
Wency June Z. Libot
#90. 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
#91. I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.
Sarah Manguso
#92. I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
William Faulkner
#93. An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#94. Antonio-
"Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma."
Peter-
"Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?
Kelley Armstrong
#95. According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good.
Walter Kirn
#96. she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.
Terry Pratchett
#97. The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)
Edward Abbey
#98. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#99. I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Mark Haddon
