This is the point. One technology doesn’t replace another, it complements. Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books.
An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.
I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
The public library is more than a repository of books. It’s a mysterious, wondrous place with the power to change lives.
This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods.
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
It wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
What a writer’s obituary should read – he wrote the books, then he died.
When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.
I think parents should know what their children are reading, and if they truly object, they should tell their kids why, rather than summarily removing a book from their possession.
Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.
Authors have to write for their characters, for who they are, that’s the strength of books. Don’t worry about censors. Just write the story you need to tell and the rewards will come.