George Steiner Book Quotations

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

The age of the book is almost gone.

What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)