Junot Diaz Quotes

The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.

The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

I collect books - a lot of books.

A glimpse at my night stand gives the mostly true impression that I am a book hoarder.

I don't know why - I have a ton of books: five full cabinets of them.

It sounds like a brag but I've got a separate room in my flat just for unread books; I don't let my read books touch my unread books.

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.

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

I can't throw books away. My wife is always telling me to get rid of some.

I have two quite large houses, and every cupboard and drawer is stuffed with books.

I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

I regret all of my books.

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.

I buy books, I have shelves of books. I love to read.

For a while, gently bumping into my nightstand meant a pile of 50 books clattering onto my head and the floor. After the 10th time this happened, I moved most of the books to a shelf in the spare room. Now, my nightstand is sort of like a bookish country club. And not all books get in.

I have about 3,500 books, maybe more.

The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.

To start with, look at all the books.

Then he got more books. He saved all the books.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.