Quotes On Why Books Are Bad

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

Siri Hustvedt

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.

Jenny Colgan

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. There is no such thing as a bad book, I just like some books more than others ...

Chris Geiger

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.

Orville Prescott

#18. Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.

Stephen King

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. if there are books perhaps it won't be all that bad.

Jo Walton

#23. That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Gore Vidal

#24. 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

#25. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

William Hazlitt

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.

Pliny

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. They were daughters of the sky. Luck belonged to them - never bad, often good, sometimes hard.

C.J. Milbrandt

#32. 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

#33. In books, often the bad guys have a story too, and sometimes it is just as tragic as the hero's.

Jennifer Megan Varnadore

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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