The Good Book, Parables, chapter 15, on books and authors

One of my favorite passages so far from _The Good Book: A Humanist
Bible_, made by A.C. Grayling, 2011.

15:6 The stranger said, ‘I would rather read a good book than meet its
author. The best of him is, or should be, in the book; in person he
might disappoint us, and ruin the book therefore.

15:7 ‘Someone once said, “Respect the book, or you disrespect its author”;

15:8 ‘But it is better to respect not the author but the best of his
mind from which his book came.

15:9 ‘In that way we respect an immortality, not a life; lives burden
the earth, but a good book is the distillation of something excellent,
captured and stored to a use beyond the daily and the passing.’