“Happy the man with a book-length grievance — and rare. Each of these books contains one possible magazine article surrounded by more padding than an offensive lineman: every little indignity that ever happened to them, and every two-bit feud, magnified to a Horrible Example to justify a larger printing.”

“An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.”

Augustine Birrell (1850–1933) British politician

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

“Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

“Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

“Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

“Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

“Not every article in every magazine or newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader's self-esteem.”

Rex Murphy (1947) Canadian journalist

“Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine- tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

“AL GORE: Not on the basics of global warming science, no. Science magazine did a review of every peer review article for the previous ten years, a large sample of more than 10 percent. None of them disagreed with this consensus.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States