Stefan Zweig Quotes

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

I'm an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too.

My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books. As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.

To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

We live for books.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.

Books are attracted to me. They make a beeline for me, and stick to me. I have been so fond of them that at last they have begun to reciprocate. In my hands books burst like ripe fruit. Like magic flowers they unfold their petals to show me the vital thought, the suggestive word, the confirming quotation, the decisive illustration.

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?

A bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you, and to know precisely where each one is located and what was happening in your life at time or where you were when you first read it is the languid and distilled pleasure of the connoisseur.

I am simply a book drunkard.

I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.

Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.

A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I'm afraid I've degenerated into a bibliophile.

Books have always been really important to me; they're my saving grace.