“Nobody steals books but your friends.”
Source: The Guns of Avalon
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Roger Zelazny 112
American speculative fiction writer 1937–1995Related quotes
Source: The Last Book in the Universe
Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)
Context: You can’t become a saint by taking dope, stealing your friends’ typewriters, giving girls chancres, not supporting your wife and children, and then reading St. John of the Cross. All of that, when it’s happened before, has typified the collapse of civilization … and today the social fabric is falling apart so fast, it makes your head swim.
Source: 84, Charing Cross Road
As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
The Tables Turned.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)