Alberto Manguel
Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia.
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.
Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.
Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past.
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.
In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.