Norman MacCaig Quotes

I think that if you really love a book, there's nothing nicer than to have a first edition of it.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid.

I am a big book collector. I love books.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

I've always spent money on books. I've always enjoyed handling books - the size, the format. I feel very strongly about original ephemera.

I collect books - a lot of books.

There is no denying the aesthetics of a well-made, well-loved book.

I'd love a signed first edition of 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster. My favourite book of all time.

Capra's great passion was Dickens. As soon as he had some money, he bought some of the rarest and most extraordinary editions of Dickens's work, and he was very proud of his collection.

The copies of The Catcher In The Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird that I own look like they were printed yesterday, and there's not a nick, not a blur, there's not any fading on the jacket at all, because they were taken and protected. A limited edition, by nature, is limited, and also probably more protected because of that. I'd rather have a first trade edition than a special one of 25 that was made years later, even if it's signed by the author. The trade edition is the Holy Grail.

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

A bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.

A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops.

An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It's a nice thing to collect because you can't go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I've only found about 12.

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

I have this obsession with really cool, old books.

I try to satisfy the desires that people have to have their books personalized. That's a value, or feature, of bibliophilia that may vanish. How do you get your e-book signed? The idea of people standing in line to get my signature in their book, it's hard to turn them away.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

Book collecting is a largely solitary, mostly male, and completely absorbing activity.

Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.

To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.