Among the earliest modern commodities were printed books … and their shrinking price and increased availability were far more historically momentous than, say, the spread of the internal combustion engine.
I was a bookworm in school, and in those days it was easy to get books. Bigger cities had book shops.
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
I hate that not everything ever written is on iBooks. Man, I hate paper.
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.
You can find my book at your favorite bookstore, and if it isn't there, find a new favorite.
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
It's weird for me to say I'm lucky when I can't go into a bookstore and have more than five choices if I want to read something about Asian-American characters.
We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.
On one occasion I went to Afghanistan to look at the borders and learn something about the situation there to see if my book was there?and it wasnt.
Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library.
In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.
When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.
I had a very wise mother. She always kept books that were my grade level in our house.
I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.
By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.
In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get his own belief.
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, 'My gosh, all these books!' The classroom and school had a library; I'd never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn't have in the township.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
