Alberto Manguel quotes

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-Canadian writer, editor, and translator, renowned for his works on reading, literature, and libraries. His books, such as "A History of Reading," have inspired readers and bibliophiles around the world. He has served as director of the National Library of Argentina and contributed widely to literary culture. Here are 73 of his quotes:

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

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

Alberto Manguel

Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.

Alberto Manguel

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

Alberto Manguel

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

Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.

Alberto Manguel

Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.

Alberto Manguel

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

The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.

Alberto Manguel

Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.

Alberto Manguel

One can transform a place by reading in it.

Alberto Manguel

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.

Alberto Manguel

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

Alberto Manguel

As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.

Alberto Manguel

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

The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.

Alberto Manguel

I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.

Alberto Manguel

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

Alberto Manguel

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

Alberto Manguel

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

Every text assumes a reader.

Alberto Manguel