Ricky > Ricky's Quotes

“Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

“Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it."

[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]”
― John Green

“Don't destroy yourself by allowing negative people add gibberish and debris to your character, reputation, and aspirations. Keep all dreams alive but discreet, so that those with unhealthy tongues won't have any other option than to infest themselves with their own diseases.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.”
― Frank Zappa

“High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.”
― Kami Garcia, Beautiful Darkness

“High School. Society’s bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life.”
― Chris Colfer, Struck By Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off.”
― Stephen King, Storm of the Century

“God has no religion.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing "Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.”
― Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

“Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have You read Nietzsche?”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.”
― Richard Price

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics