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"I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig
"Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thump. And that's not the only reason."
"People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share."
"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird."
"There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books."
"When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books."
"A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest."
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