Quote

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

Alberto Manguel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Doesn
Reader
Flips
Moments
Writer
Limbo
Book
Full
Flip
Come
Stop
Text
Writing
Lasts
Stops
Life
Point
Puts
Last
Picks
Moment
Pages

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

Image
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
Image
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
Alberto Manguel
Image
If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
Alberto Manguel
Image
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
Image
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word text unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?
Alberto Manguel
Image
If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.
Alberto Manguel
Image
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
Alberto Manguel
Image
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The starting point is a question.
Alberto Manguel
Image
It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.
Alberto Manguel