Junot Diaz, author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, & This Is How You Lose Her
“I started acquiring books as soon as I started earning my own money. I was twelve, I guess. Had a couple of paper routes.”
“I cannot exaggerate how poor my family was in my childhood, and there were days when it was a toss-up between food and books–and like Erasmus I tended to buy books first.”
“Books for me are many things: they are friends, they are companions, they are mentors, they are warnings, they clown, they entertain, they hearten, and they make me stronger. But most of all books (I say again and again) are like the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order’.
Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials
“There’s never been a phase in my life when books were not important, and nor has there been a time when I stopped reading. It’s almost as important as breathing.”
“A printing press can exist and work in a room anywhere, with no electricity at all, and the paper and the ink and bookbinding have a kind or artisanal comprehensibility, but the computer…When the big crash comes, I shall throw away my Kindle without a moment’s regret; but my books will last as long as I do.”
(Quotes and Images from Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books from Yale University Press, $20)
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