"Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books." (Benjamin Disraeli, "Vivian Grey", 1826)
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)
"If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid." (Ursula K Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)
"Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us." (Stephen King, "Salem's Lot", 1975)
"So together they left the office and walked into the uncertainty of the rest of their lives. That, in the final analysis, is the great adventure in which each of us takes part; what more courageous thing is there, after all, than facing the unknown we all share, the danger and joy that awaits us in the unread pages of the Book of the Future [...]" (George Alec Effinger," The World of Pez Pavilion: Preliminary to the Groundbreaking Ceremony", 1983)
"No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading." (Orson Scott Card, "Ender’s Game", 1985)
"The book designer strives for perfection; yet every perfect thing lives somewhere in the neighborhood of dullness and is frequently mistaken for it by the insensitive." (Jan Tschichold, "The form of the book: essays on the morality of good design", 1991)
"There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries." (Umberto Eco, "Baudolino", 2000)
"Science fiction these days is only half a step ahead of science. Astrophysicists and scientists are working in the same way as science fiction writers. They’re working things out in their imagination based on the slim scientific facts that they know. Hawking imagines a black hole and then discovers the mathematics that support his theory, and new possibilities come to light. That’s the imaginative flair that scientists have to have. For me as a sci-fi writer, spinning those ideas in your mind brings you to the point where you dream in science fiction. Suddenly you think of something in the middle of the night, and it’s so vivid you don’t need to write it down because you know you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s what these books, Zero G, reflect: a vivid imagination." (William Shatner, "William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment", Saturday Evening Post, [interview] 2017)
"[...] out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time." (Francis Bacon)
"Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them." (Clive S Lewis)
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