199 Quotes by Alberto Manguel

I don’t remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

You don’t immediately understand something like that, even when it’s explained to you clearly. You don’t understand it, because you don’t know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it’s popular. What I’m saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?

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.

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.

Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive.

Our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.