Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

We are flooded with books; books come pouring out of the publishing meat grinder. And, the quality has dropped severely. We may be able to print a book better, but intrinsically the book, perhaps, is not better than it was. We have a backlist of books, superb books, by Margaret Wise Brown, by Ruth Krauss, by lots of people. I’d much rather we just took a year off, a moratorium: no more books. For a year, maybe two — just stop publishing. And get those old books back, let the children see them! Books don’t go out of fashion with children; they only go out of fashion with adults. So that kids are deprived of the works of art which are no longer around simply because new ones keep coming out.

from The Openhearted Audience (1980)

We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.

The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading the old ones.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Books which are no books.

I guess there are never enough books.

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.