Hari Kunzru Quotes

I love to both give and receive very old books.

I have this obsession with really cool, old books.

I am a big book collector. I love books.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

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

I collect books - a lot of books.

I love physical books, can't bear to throw them away, and am drowning under the weight of my collection, but I do a lot of my work reading now on my iPad.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

I've always spent money on books. I've always enjoyed handling books - the size, the format. I feel very strongly about original ephemera.

I think that if you really love a book, there's nothing nicer than to have a first edition of it.

Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.

If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

I am not man or beast; I am bibliosexual, and a seedy bibliosexual who haunts the streets, laden with carrier bags held by blistered fingers, stooping under the weight of the rucksack that has brought on sciatica and a Dickensian demeanour.

I have to admit that I am really partial to the look and feel of a book. I have been that way my entire life.

I am still a lover of paper books. One of my first jobs was in a bookstore, and I still like to be able to write in a margin and feel the paper. Once inside of a digital device, I end up losing things.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that M. Dirda is a sucker for anything bookish in the way of artwork.

I'm a huge fan of 'The Lost Weekend.' I have this dog-eared copy of the 1963 Time Reading Program edition, which was a series of contemporary classics reprinted as a quality paperback.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.

I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything.