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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

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Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
Lasts
Pleasures
Last
List
Fact
Lists
Eaves
Making
Genre
Deadlines
Comes
Minute
Superb
Facts
Surprise
Combining
Minutes
Deadline
Pleasure
Dropping

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

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From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
Alberto Manguel
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To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
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Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
Alberto Manguel
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I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.
Alberto Manguel
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Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.
Alberto Manguel
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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
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Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
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In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Alberto Manguel
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Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
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Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
Alberto Manguel
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A library is an ever-growing entity it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Alberto Manguel
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One can transform a place by reading in it.
Alberto Manguel
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As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing.
Alberto Manguel
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Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.
Alberto Manguel
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The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Alberto Manguel
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As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
Alberto Manguel
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If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Alberto Manguel
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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