“The message is clear and loud. The fortunes of the persons who rule the country and the contents of the textbooks run in tandem. When Ayub Khan was in power in 1969 and the Urdu book was published it was right and proper that the bulk of it should be in praise of him. When, in 1970, he was no longer on the scene and this English translation was published it was meet that the book should ignore him. All the books published during Zia's years of power followed this practice. The conclusion is inescapable: the students arc not taught contemporary history but an anthology of tributes to current rulers. The authors are not scholars or writers but courtiers.”
The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993
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Khursheed Kamal Aziz 4
historian 1927–2009Related quotes
“It is impossible to publish your book, and it will not be published in the next 200 years.”
1960s
“When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.”
"A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1
It's a roll call of dead books.
Salon interview (1997)
From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book
“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual.”
"A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics (April 1928)
Context: A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
The Indian Story of an Author (2018)
As quoted in Triumph of Survival : The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era 1650-1995 (1993) by Berel Wein, p. 96
Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 56