“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”

“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”

“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”

“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.”

“Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.”

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”

“There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”

“There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.”

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. […] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”