Saddling another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro.

Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise.

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.

I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mysteics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness.