Book Culture Quotes

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.

I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose?

I cannot live without books.

The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as artifact on our language and culture. Reading this book broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas.

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

'Fault' became the book everybody and their mother had to read, and 'Paper Towns' is one that's beloved, but it's a bit of a smaller book.

I hate that bookstores are closing. Hate it! What's better than hanging out a bookstore, be it independent or chain, and talking books with people who love books?

I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn't brimming with books.

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

The age of the book is almost gone.

I fall for all those lists of 100 books you must read, and go out and buy most of them.

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.

I loathe people who say, 'I always read the ending of the book first.' That really irritates me, It's like someone coming to dinner, just opening the fridge and eating pudding, while you're standing there still working on the starter. It's not on.

What terrifies me is that I might somehow endorse that view so people think they don't have to read books anymore.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.