What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.
I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.
Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
I make movies for me and posterity. I'm more scared of history than I am of the studio.
History is simply man’s desperate bid to give substance to his most visionary dreams.
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.
