Quotes About Print Books

#1. Well, it wasn't really a decision on my part although you always hope as an author that a book that goes out of print somehow winds up back in print. These days publishers like to put out-of-print books into e-book form, but I really wanted to do an update.

Bob Colacello

#2. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Morris West

#3. Print will never die. There's no substitute for the feel of an actual book. I adore physically turning the pages, and being able to underline passages and not worrying about dropping them in the bath or running out of power. I also find print books objects of beauty.

J.K. Rowling

#4. I often buy print books only after I've read them in some digital form or other. It's my odd way of keeping the physical presence of the best among multitudes. And I only have one shelf.

Joyce Rachelle

#5. A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

John Hodgman

#6. The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

Vint Cerf

#7. I want to print books by people in the film industry.

Brett Ratner

#8. I'm not a big fan of my books going on cross-country road trips. They get arrogant and, next thing, start aspiring to become 'large-print' books. I say, let them stay home and be regular small-print books.

George Saunders

#9. I guess I never grew up. I was still reading kids' books in high school and college. I was always interested in writing or illustrating children's books, and I started collecting out-of-print books when I was about 10 years old.

Michael Patrick Hearn

#10. I prefer to read print books. Maybe I'm just a little old-school. I do read e-books.

Sue Monk Kidd

#11. Ebooks have many advantages - publishers don't have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go "out of print", and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.

Kate Grenville

#12. We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.

Nick Harkaway

#13. I produced audio editions of 'Beneath' and 'Kronos' primarily to grow my audience. I'd seen it work for guys like Scott Sigler and J.C. Hutchins and thought their audience might enjoy my books as well. The goal was to get them hooked on the audio and hope they would migrate to the print books.

Jeremy Robinson

#14. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks: the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us.

John Milton

#15. If you drop a book into the toilet, you can fish it out, dry it off and read that book. But if you drop your Kindle in the toilet, you're pretty well done.

Stephen King

#16. Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

Archibald MacLeish

#17. Mentoring is the last refuge of the older artist. With luck, disciples will keep one's books in print, one's reputation alive.

Michael Dirda

#18. In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

Sara Paretsky

#19. New York is the place where they bind books and write blurbs and arrange the publicity and print the galleys ... But Chicago is the place where the book is lived out before it is bound and the song is sung before it is recorded.

Nelson Algren

#20. Books were put out, and 'had a run,' / Like coinage from the mint; / But which could fill the place of one, / That one they wouldn't print?

Phoebe Cary

#21. We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

Charlotte Mason

#22. Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries. I believe print and web can work beautifully together.

Donna Talarico

#23. What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

William Boyd

#24. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have!

Anthony Doerr

#25. If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Benjamin Franklin

#26. If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

Lewis Buzbee

#27. I love book books, real books, books with spines and heart, dust jackets, books that smell of books. Take the frame from a painting and you have a painting, not art. Take the pages from a book and print them on a screen and you have the ghost of a book. Not a book.

Chloe Thurlow

#28. The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

Cal Thomas

#29. I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.

William Boyd

#30. I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#31. When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.

J.A. Konrath

#32. It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.

Dave Eggers

#33. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Lawrence Lessig

#34. I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

Gloria Stuart

#35. I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

Paula Danziger

#36. My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

Mary Oliver

#37. I need words and print ... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.

Margaret Drabble

#38. Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?

Charles Stross

#39. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

Sylvia Plath

#40. One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

William Goldman

#41. I'd forced books on my kids from the day they were born and, as it turned out, it had been completely unnecessary because all of them liked to read. Or maybe they liked to read because I'd read aloud nearly every children's book in print.

Jeff Shelby

#42. Every time we read to a child, we're sending a 'pleasure' message to the child's brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.

Jim Trelease

#43. The books I would like to print are the books I love to read and keep.

William Morris

#44. One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

Diane Wakoski

#45. Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades.

Sid Fleischman

#46. In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Jonathan Lethem

#47. Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

Stella Gibbons

#48. Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Richard Bach

#49. They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along.

Cleo Moore

#50. I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

Dean Koontz

#51. Isn't it silly to talk of books as if they were just print and paper, when they are really stars and seas and cities and pictures and people and everything!

Zephine Humphrey

#52. For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions.

Scott Bradfield

#53. Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Douglas Adams

#54. Though I enjoy the occasional eBook from time to time, I will only stop reading books printed on paper when they pry them from my cold, dead, withered hands, and even then, they will be hard pressed to take them from me.

H.L. Stephens

#55. You can print a book, unfortunately you can't print the audience

Benny Bellamacina

#56. Books are the carriers of civilization ... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#57. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#58. It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

Iain Sinclair

#59. When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

William Goldman

#60. Now, past middle age, with so many books written I still care about and only a few still in print, I know the feeling of being overlooked.

Richard Elman

#61. Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries.

Kate Klise

#62. I have spoken, and I was understood. It's not like I'm a tragic person who wasn't understood. All those books are in print, all those movies are still out there, the audience gets younger. So I don't have that "I've got to do one thing before I die." I did it.

John Waters

#63. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#64. I love books . I adore everything about them. I love the feel of the pages on my fingertips. They are light enough to carry, yet so heavy with worlds and ideas . I love the sound of the pages flicking against my fingers. Print against fingerprints. Books make people quiet, yet they are so loud

Nnedi Okorafor

#65. She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.

Cornelia Funke