Matt Haig Quotes

I would like to save all books, those that are banned, those that are burned, or forgotten with contempt by the mandarins who want to tell us what is good and what is bad. Every book has a soul ... and I believe every book is worth saving from either bigotry or oblivion.

Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.

When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

I thought [books ban] was crazy. Really my thoughts were "This is America, we don't do this here" but of course I know a lot better now. And I wasn't the only one. Norma Klein was writing at the same time. Her books were going. So many of us. When you say to me, no you can't do this I say, oh yes I can.

The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.

Banning books is just another form of bullying. It's all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.

I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.

The space between the young reader’s eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril.’

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners.

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.

A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.