“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”

—  Andrei Tarkovsky , book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 177

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update April 18, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books." by Andrei Tarkovsky?
Andrei Tarkovsky photo
Andrei Tarkovsky 55
Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film th… 1932–1986

Related quotes

Mohsin Hamid photo

“It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books…”

Mohsin Hamid book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Source: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

R.L. Stine photo

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”

R.L. Stine (1943) American writer and producer
Glen Cook photo

“Though it might wear a thousand different names in a thousand different times, and might come from a thousand different directions, darkness always comes.”

Glen Cook book She Is the Darkness

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 69 (p. 517)

Carl Sagan photo

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Martin Luther photo

“One Book is enough, but a thousand books is not too many!”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation
George Pólya photo

“In those days editions did not run to thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies as modern books—especially, bad books—do.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)
Context: The volume of the cone was discovered by Democritus... He did not prove it, he guessed it... not a blind guess, rather it was reasoned conjecture. As Archimedes has remarked, great credit is due to Democritus for his conjecture since this made proof much easier. Eudoxes... a pupil of Plato, subsequently gave a rigorous proof. Surely the labor or writing limited his manuscript to a few copies; none has survived. In those days editions did not run to thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies as modern books—especially, bad books—do. However, the substance of what he wrote is nevertheless available to us.... Euclid's great achievement was the systematization of the works of his predecessors. The Elements preserve several of Eudoxes' proofs.

“If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Borgias on my mind'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Related topics