Book Survival Quotes

People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it's as if books did die out.

As part of my research for An Anthology of Authors' Atrocity Stories About Publishers, I conducted a study (employing my usual controls) that showed the average shelf life of a trade book to be somewhere between milk and yoghurt.

People start panicking because they think it's the end of everything. But the fact is, you know, books survived movies; books survived TV. Books are surviving manga and anime. Books will always be there in one form or another. You just have a larger palette of entertainment options.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

A classic is a book that remains in print

The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die but books never die.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

The Bible has, amazingly- no doubt with supernatural grace-survived its critics. The harder tyrants try to eliminate it and skeptics dismiss it, the better read it becomes.

I don't know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully expect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.

I don't know where everything is going, but I'm pretty confident that people like books - the objects. So I'm going to go on that -they're not going to disappear.

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.

You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.