“If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”

“When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.”

Piers Anthony Golem in the Gears

“I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

“Nobody steals books but your friends.”

Roger Zelazny book The Guns of Avalon

“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

“[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop… You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

“Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

“Books are the gardens of scholars.”

Ali (601–661) cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad

“Of course. You get everything from books.”

Gregory Maguire Out of Oz

“I have great respect for the unconditional teachers called books. Because from a book, you can either learn, or you can’t.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor