‘If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.’ – Marcus Tullius Cicero

‘The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.’ – Carl T. Rowan

‘A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.’ – Henry Ward Beecher

‘A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.’ – Norman Cousins

‘If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.’ – Frank Zappa

‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.’ – Jorge Luis Borges

‘I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘Your library is your paradise.’ – Desiderius Erasmus

‘Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.’ – Henri Frederic Amiel

‘A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.’ – Ray Bradbury

‘If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?’ – Lily Tomlin

‘It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.’ – Jarrett J. Krosoczka

‘I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.’ – Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey

‘A library implies an act of faith.’ – Victor Hugo

‘The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer’s cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.’ – Groucho Marx

‘I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.’ – Rodney Dangerfield

‘The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It’s a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections – and it’s hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.’ – Alan Bennett

‘Why buy a book when you can join a library.’ – Ricky Gervais

‘The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.’ – Samuel Johnson

‘I read all the time. I love it. My fantasy would be to be locked into a library. I’d be very, very happy.’ – Pink

‘So he said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.’ I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.” – Tommy Cooper

‘A library is thought in cold storage.’ – Herbert Samuel

‘Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.’ – Laura Bush

‘That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.’ – Aphra Behn

‘When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.’ – Isaac Asimov

‘Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.’ – Charles Bukowski

‘It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.’ – Noam Chomsky

‘What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists.’ – Archibald MacLeish

‘I plan to live on campus in a dormitory and to do all the things any other student of the law school might do: use the library, eat in the dining hall, attend classes.’ – Medgar Evers

‘A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.’ – Cornelia Funke

‘A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.’ – Arthur Conan Doyle

‘For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.’ – Pete Hamill

‘With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.’ – Doris Lessing

‘A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.’ – Arthur Baer

‘I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don’t belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs.’ – Brian Selznick

‘Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.’ – Thomas Jefferson

‘Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.’ – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

‘My books are very few, but then the world is before me – a library open to all – from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me – in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve.’ – Joseph Howe

‘I’ve got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.’ – Joseph Fiennes

‘Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don’t get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.’ – Neil deGrasse Tyson

‘As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.’ – Arthur Schopenhauer

‘I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.’ – Alexander Smith

‘If there are no films or plays of interest to me, I don’t go. I know how to go to a museum or a library or pick up a good magazine or I can watch the sun set. I know how to live. There’s a whole creation out there full of magic and wonder to be explored.’ – Phylicia Rashad

‘Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.’ – Anatole France

‘Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.’ – Michael Caine

‘I spent many hours ensconced in the local library, reading – nay, devouring – book after book after book. Books were my soul’s delight.’ – Nikki Grimes

‘Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.’ – Zadie Smith

‘I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.’ – Elisabeth Shue

‘My library is segregated into philosophy, history, general reading, travel, my own books… and only three cookbooks.’ – Sudha Murty

‘In Liverpool, where I live, we have a brilliant library which has been refurbished, and I like going there.’ – Shaun Evans

‘The best preparation for acting is life – observing life and people and observing yourself. All that becomes your library. So when you have to research a part, a scene or an emotion, you go into the library and get what you need.’ – Kate Capshaw

‘When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‘Calculus for the Practical Man.’ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.’ – Richard P. Feynman

‘I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.’ – Ray Bradbury

‘My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.’ – Anne Lamott

‘Immersing myself in Shakespeare’s plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.’ – Lady Bird Johnson

‘Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.’ – Kate Williams

‘Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can’t go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can’t get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.’ – Katherine Paterson

‘When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.’ – Dolly Parton

‘The public library system of the United States is worth preserving.’ – Henry Rollins

‘The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.’ – Bjarne Stroustrup

‘Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe that’s why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.’ – Kim Edwards

‘It was an incredible resource. I’d sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the ‘Talk of the Town’ sections.’ – Michael Chabon

‘I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.’ – Justin Trudeau

‘I bought a former library, not because I have a lot of books, but also I like architecture, and it was built in 1965, and I like gardening.’ – Udo Kier

‘When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.’ – Dallas Willard

‘I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library.’ – Adriana Trigiani

‘It may not be possible to get rare roast beef but if you’re willing to settle for well done, ask them to hold the sweetened library paste that passes for gravy.’ – Marian Burros

‘When Sondheim was visiting the Library of Congress, where the manuscript of ‘Porgy and Bess’ is housed, he was so overcome with emotion while holding the score in his hands that he shed a tear. He shed several tears, but one of the tears actually fell onto the original manuscript. And he was horrified.’ – Michael Feinstein

‘I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.’ – H. P. Lovecraft

‘I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn’t time enough to read everything I wanted to read.’ – Charles Kuralt

‘Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.’ – Barbara W. Tuchman

‘I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.’ – Sandra Cisneros

‘This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.’ – Bill Gates

‘Oxford is wonderful. I’m having a great time. We do go out, but I still try to spend most of my time studying in the library.’ – Chelsea Clinton

‘I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.’ – Louis L’Amour

‘A man will turn over half a library to make one book.’ – Samuel Johnson

‘There are probably a few library fines I haven’t paid yet, but I’m a pretty clean-cut guy overall.’ – Al Yankovic

‘During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.’ – Irvin D. Yalom

‘The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.’ – Gore Vidal

‘You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.’ – Clay Shirky

‘In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.’ – Elizabeth McCracken

‘Is there anything so delicious as the first exploration of a great library – alone – unwatched?’ – Richard Jefferies

‘I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly ,as I was able to, travelling around the world.’ – Matthew Reilly

‘I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You’ll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn’t fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.’ – Alberto Manguel

‘I’ve always loved to paint – I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model – and I’ve being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.’ – Alek Wek

‘My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing – communication devices. I grew up between my father’s laboratory and my mother’s library.’ – Rashid Johnson

‘When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.’ – Aaron Swartz

‘The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.’ – Gary Wolf

‘I came across ‘The Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller in one of the most romantic ways one can find a story. I was digging through a pile of used books at my local library when my hand gravitated toward its brilliant teal and glistening gold cover.’ – Taylor Jenkins Reid

‘I hate recording all the shows for the week in one day, because I want to be able to mention current events and pop culture. If Madonna punches Britney in the face today, I want to reference that on ‘Wine Library TV’ tomorrow. Monday’s episode is always the best, because it’s hot off the press.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘If the library’s rarest frequenters are the ones we’d like to see in them the most, then libraries are failing.’ – David Harsanyi

‘Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘I remember I was in grade school, the fourth grade, in a free reading period in the library. Someone in my class found a copy of the Forbes 400, a list of the richest people in America, and my dad’s name was on it.’ – Jamie Johnson

‘The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.’ – Noam Chomsky

‘We weren’t dirt poor, but there was no spare money kicking around. While it was very much understood that the way to a better life was through education, books were a luxury we couldn’t afford. But when I was six, we actually moved opposite the central library, and that became my home from home.’ – Val McDermid

‘I started writing songs in high school, so you had to write this stuff out and register it with the Library of Congress. You had to learn how to do that stuff.’ – Gordon Lightfoot

‘Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.’ – Jorge Luis Borges

‘I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library.’ Who could say that this is bad?’ – Terry Pratchett

‘When I was growing up, I remember having read all the books in the library. I often tried to emulate my favourite writers.’ – Ruskin Bond

‘I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.’ – Mark Foley

‘A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life.’ – Norman Cousins

‘Yes, there’s such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o’clock in the morning. You’ll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o’clock in the morning.’ – Louis Nizer

‘Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.’ – Anthony Burgess

‘My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.’ – Malcolm X

‘Your library is your portrait.’ – Holbrook Jackson

‘No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library… When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.’ – Lawrence Clark Powell

‘I’m not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.’ – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

‘An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.’ – Stephen Fry

‘No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.’ – Samuel Johnson

‘If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day. ‘Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here’s Matt researching in aisle six of his local library’. A few hours of that and they’d go home.’ – Matt Damon

‘People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.’ – Simeon Strunsky

‘If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library.’ – Tony Benn

‘I wanted to be in a band that gave bang for the buck. I wanted to be in the band who didn’t look like a bunch of guys who, you know, should be in a library studying for their finals.’ – Gene Simmons

‘People go back to the stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don’t have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.’ – Frank Black

‘Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.’ – John Dingell

‘Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don’t think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there’s always a library.’ – Michelle Rodriguez

‘I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.’ – Walter Wager

‘My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.’ – Bram Cohen

‘I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.’ – Mark Ruffalo

‘Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.’ – James Loeb

‘The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.’ – Joseph Lancaster

‘I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it’s fresh.’ – Leo Kottke

‘I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.’ – Leo Kottke

‘I loved doing problems in school. I’d take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem – Fermat’s Last Theorem.’ – Andrew Wiles

‘But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.’ – Andrew Wiles

‘If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.’ – Cornelia Funke

‘And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.’ – Cornelia Funke

‘If you’re setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign.’ – Graham Nelson

‘I’m really a library man, or second-hand book man.’ – John le Carre

‘I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I’m trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.’ – Rick Moody

‘There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.’ – Anthony Hecht

‘I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.’ – Tom Glazer

‘Then I started checking out blues albums from the library and playing the harp along with them.’ – John Goodman

‘When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.’ – Alexander Kluge

‘That’s Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I’d never worked with before.’ – Al Jarreau

‘I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I’d do arithmetic exercises.’ – Clyde Tombaugh

‘During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.’ – Philip Emeagwali

‘Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.’ – Bjarne Stroustrup

‘I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.’ – Hedy Lamarr

‘However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.’ – Richard Ernst

‘There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.’ – Martin Lewis Perl

‘Currently I am working on another three books, doing a lot of magazine work, am shooting for fifteen stock agencies, plus my own photo library – all this keeps me quite busy!’ – Nigel Dennis

‘As a journalist I’m comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.’ – Anita Diament

‘First, this isn’t about telecommuting, because we still have offices that people will come to regularly when they need to brainstorm together, meet with clients, or do research in the library.’ – Jay Chiat

‘I mean, for all of his faults and the troubles in his marriage, Bill Clinton is still married to a girl he met in the library 25 years ago at school. Can we say that about many of our other leaders today in America, including on the right wing?’ – Paul Begala

‘We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That’s the only disadvantage.’ – Mordecai Richler

‘We didn’t have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn’t have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library – and anyway, I told myself stories.’ – John Sladek

‘I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.’ – Mike Myers

‘The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people’s private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.’ – Jose Serrano

‘If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.’ – Lawrence Lessig

‘Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library.’ – Laura Bush

‘I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.’ – Kurt Masur

‘I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.’ – Thomas Friedman

‘Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.’ – Rita Dove

‘There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.’ – Rita Dove

‘I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.’ – Jose Saramago

‘I don’t know what your childhood was like, but we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.’ – Robert Redford

‘If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.’ – Alan Dundes

‘I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I’d pick out an author and I would read all their books.’ – Tom T. Hall

‘Dynasty was the opportunity to take charge of my career rather than waiting around like a library book waiting to be loaned out.’ – Joan Collins

‘It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn’t.’ – Carolyn Wells

‘The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one’s children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.’ – Bruno Bettelheim

‘My best friend growing up really put the bug in my ear about acting. We created this one hour-and-a-half improv play when we were 10 or 11 and performed it at the library. We just played off each other so well and had the best time doing it and the funniest part was, we wound up having packed houses, other people loved it too.’ – Katherine Moennig

‘To make sure that votes are never canceled out by illegal votes, we instituted a photo ID requirement. And don’t you think it’s fair to apply at least the same standard required to get a library card or to board an airpane?’ – Rick Perry

‘My first job was as an assistant in the local library. Self-fulfilling prophecy?’ – Jodi Picoult

‘My office in New York is overflowing with all kinds of cookbooks, and in New Orleans we have a huge culinary library. So yeah, I guess I’m a little bit obsessed.’ – Emeril Lagasse

‘Library campaigners are not prepared to stand by and watch something they cherish be dismantled brick by brick.’ – Kate Mosse

‘Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors’ phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.’ – Marc Andreessen

‘I’m old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.’ – Charlie Kaufman

‘That Moorish architecture is all over the place, of course. It affects me everywhere I see it, as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me, and I know I’ve paid homage to it many times in my drawings.’ – Jim Woodring

‘Let me tell you this, if I had wanted to have a library of audio and videotapes of Bill Clinton, I could have had that. And after I was accused of being a liar, I wished that I had of.’ – Gennifer Flowers

‘The library is seen as a force for self improvement and the pursuit of knowledge. I fear that in many cases this is no longer true, if it ever was.’ – John Redwood

‘When I go to a premiere I like to borrow lovely clothes and shoes from designers. It’s like the library: if you return them in good condition, you get to borrow more. I’m very lucky.’ – Sarah Jessica Parker

‘And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.’ – Sarah Jessica Parker

‘I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you’re immortal.’ – Tom Clancy

‘The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.’ – Lynda Barry

‘I’m not a library.’ – Sidney Poitier

‘Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.’ – Nate Silver

‘As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn’t even list ‘homosexuality’ as a topic.’ – James McGreevey

‘As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.’ – James Wolcott

‘Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.’ – Peter Singer

‘If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.’ – Peter Singer

‘When I was growing up, if there was a Young Adult section of my town’s library, I missed it. I wandered right from ‘The Babysitter’s Club’ over to Stephen King. His books were big and fat and they seemed important. I eventually worked my way through most of the shelf, but ‘It’ is the one that stuck with me.’ – Erin Morgenstern

‘Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.’ – Malcolm Turnbull

‘You start to accumulate your library of music. You want that music everywhere – that’s the point where we monetize. If you want portability, mobility, and access, then you buy it.’ – Sean Parker

‘If there’s a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worked in the library. It’s such a force for social good and it can do so much.’ – Gary Ross

‘In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don’t reach Africa and we are being left behind.’ – George Weah

‘I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library. I was around nine years old when I began choosing my own books in earnest.’ – Adriana Trigiani

‘Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.’ – Anthony Horowitz

‘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.’ – Lev Grossman

‘The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.’ – Lev Grossman

‘I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.’ – Laura Marling

‘I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.’ – Seth Grahame-Smith

‘When ‘The Awakening’ was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author’s home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.’ – Jane Smiley

‘Simply as a writer of books I’m thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.’ – Jonathan Raban

‘At Yahoo, we were one of the early proponents of the power of content showcased through new media. SnagFilms, with its large library and breadth of digital distribution, can help shape this next phase, bringing great stories to broad new audiences.’ – Terry Semel

‘I have a home-school group with a couple of my friends. We switch off going to each others’ houses and going to the library to do art and stuff. It’s almost like our own little school – a really little school.’ – Willow Shields

‘Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started ‘Wine Library TV.’ They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘I know if I stopped hosting ‘Wine Library TV,’ we’d probably lose 75 percent of our audience, but the remaining 25 percent is still a big number.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn’t due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘To this day, my mom’s unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years, she’s worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as ‘Sami.’ Along with 500 miles of shelved books, her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself.’ – Hoda Kotb

‘It’s one thing, holding open the door for someone at a grocery store, or the library, or just about anyplace else. But the doughnut shop is a different thing altogether. This is a get-in-and-out-as-fast-as-you-can operation. There’s no room for courtesy or chivalry here.’ – Linwood Barclay

‘You can’t love a library of e-books. You can’t furnish a room with e-books.’ – Joanna Trollope

‘When I first moved to L.A., I didn’t have a lot of money to join a gym or take classes, so I improvised. My sister and I went to the library and looked over their DVD collection and discovered Neena and Veena, these Egyptian twins who have a whole series of belly dancing routines. We did them all.’ – AnnaLynne McCord

‘As a child, I wanted only two things – to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.’ – Julie Burchill

‘I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.’ – Nicholson Baker

‘I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins – I was only 16 years old – we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.’ – John Lewis

‘Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.’ – Geraldine Brooks

‘I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.’ – Wilbur Smith

‘Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining.’ – Scott Turow

‘For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.’ – Scott Turow

‘We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I’d read as many of those as I could.’ – Sue Townsend

‘I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.’ – Concha Buika

‘I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.’ – Hilary Mantel

‘I moved to New York City in ’92 and had no money. I had a lot of free time, as actors do. I would go to the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.’ – Denis O’Hare

‘I grew up in the ‘hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.’ – Lupe Fiasco

‘In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.’ – Adam Gopnik

‘When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.’ – Jennifer Egan

‘I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.’ – David Nicholls

‘For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children’s fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.’ – David Nicholls

‘The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house – and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.’ – Peter York

‘In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and immediately fell in love.’ – Jess Walter

‘All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.’ – Linda Sue Park

‘God bless Interlibrary Loan. I pay a lot of library fines. In the case of ‘A Single Shard,’ I was using books that hadn’t been checked out in 30 years, so I didn’t feel too bad.’ – Linda Sue Park

‘My mom used to tell me that the most valuable thing she owned was her library card. We were poor, but that’s not what she was talking about. My mom knew that education opened doors and opened minds.’ – Richard Carmona

‘I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.’ – Jane Green

‘My father was an engineer – he wasn’t literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world’s great readers. Every two weeks, he’d take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms – ‘Have you read this? And this? And this?” – Janet Fitch

‘My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn’t one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.’ – Gary Kemp

‘We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two – a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star.’ – Gary Kemp

‘I’ve never been a collector – just a consumer – and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don’t normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.’ – Rick Riordan

‘I’m a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.’ – Stacy Schiff

‘The library helps lower- and middle-income people – immigrants – get their shot at the American dream.’ – Stephen A. Schwarzman

‘My father was in the Army and we moved around a lot, and one of my favorite places was the library.’ – Suzan-Lori Parks

‘I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me – because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.’ – Walter Dean Myers

‘I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ – Walter Dean Myers

‘I always have to go out to work even if it’s just a desk somewhere or an office or the British Library.’ – David Morrissey

‘The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.’ – Zadie Smith

‘But it’s the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That’s why I don’t just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven’t been.’ – Hari Kunzru

‘I don’t have sophisticated tastes. I have average tastes. If you looked in my collection of DVDs, you’d see ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars.’ In the book library, you’d see John Grisham and Sidney Sheldon. And if you look in my fridge, it’s, like, children’s food – chips, milkshakes, yogurt.’ – Simon Cowell

‘How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering.’ – Louis Kahn

‘When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I’d love to say it all turned out great. It didn’t. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it.’ – Nathan Myhrvold

‘I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.’ – David Blaine

‘My music library has about every genre of music possible. I’ve really gotten into Ray LaMontagne, He makes amazing music, so I listen to him, and he’s a great artist.’ – Jean-Luc Bilodeau

‘I don’t think if you’re serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.’ – Andrew Wylie

‘I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic – an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.’ – Bruce Feiler

‘An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.’ – Marian Seldes

‘I have this book club, and we don’t read one book; we offer up a few suggestions and create a library over time.’ – Claire Danes

‘I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I’m on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.’ – Steve Earle

‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could put all the published works online? The Internet Archive is trying to become useful as a modern-day digital library.’ – Brewster Kahle

‘The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It’s an unending source of visuals and ideas.’ – Maira Kalman

‘Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books.’ – Gary Wolf

‘There’s no architect who doesn’t want to build a library – and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading – because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity – that is a very exciting area in architecture.’ – Annabelle Selldorf

‘Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.’ – Howard Rheingold

‘As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It’s eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.’ – Kathryn Schulz

‘I use my awards as doorstops. Others are in the office or in little cubbyholes in our library – they go between the books, because they actually look like arty pieces.’ – Helen McCrory

‘I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.’ – Paul Engle

‘My stepfather introduced me to The London Library when I was about 18; the clientele has definitely changed since then, but it is still a wonderful oasis in the middle of London.’ – Natascha McElhone

‘As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.’ – Tracy Chapman

‘The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.’ – Christine Quinn

‘I got kicked out in grade school because I staged a riot because I wanted more library time.’ – Bitsie Tulloch

‘As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children’s library until I finished the children’s library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.’ – Neil Gaiman

‘I was diagnosed with diabetes at age 18. I didn’t know what it was, so I went to the library and looked it up.’ – Ron Santo

‘My maternal grandmother – she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.’ – Umberto Eco

‘Three times a year, there’s Strategicon convention, and I go for the board games. It happens Presidents Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day weekends. You go and take a look at the new board games and meet a couple of board game designers, and you can check out games you don’t own from the library and then return them.’ – Rich Sommer

‘I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere’s a research library and I can’t get an elitist kick from it any more.’ – Douglas Coupland

‘I didn’t belong to the sort of family where the children’s classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.’ – Pat Barker

‘Nobody gets irony anymore, as we are now living in the post-ironic age. Once George Bush gets a library, our irony is dead.’ – Eric Idle

‘I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library – I’m a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction – so I’ll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I’ll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.’ – Anthony Geary

‘I was raised in rural south Jersey, and there was no culture there. There was a small library, and that was it. There was nothing else.’ – Patti Smith

‘London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world… It’s got everything you want, really.’ – David Attenborough

‘The only thing that I discovered very early on is that, even though we might change schools and cities and towns and states, the books in the library were the same. They had the same covers. They had the same characters. I could go and visit those people in the library as if I knew them.’ – J. Michael Straczynski

‘When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.’ – Camille Paglia

‘The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men – positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist.’ – Warren Farrell

‘I want all my stuff to be converted into digital format so I can have my reference library to carry with me wherever I go.’ – Jim Lee

‘I try to give the music more of a campfire feel as opposed to a library atmosphere. I like when you can hear people hanging out in the songs and doing a little shuffling. It creates a feeling of participation.’ – Alex Ebert

‘I am a member of the London Library, and on almost every single job I do, there is some benefit to be had in going there and pulling two or three books off the shelves.’ – Ed Stoppard

‘Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.’ – Robert Darnton

‘The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it’s their property, so to speak.’ – Robert Darnton

‘It’s important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.’ – Robert Darnton

‘I have an iPod, but I put my music in it from my CDs, and then I have that CD in my library.’ – Eddie Trunk

‘In design-speak, ‘a library’ means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that’s all you have room for.’ – Nate Berkus

‘When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of ‘The Other Side of Midnight’ by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.’ – Lauren DeStefano

‘I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.’ – Michio Kaku

‘The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.’ – Ben Schott

‘If I’m researching something strange and rococo, I’ll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.’ – Ben Schott

‘Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can’t write, and I can’t write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.’ – Jenny Offill

‘I got hit by the bug of reading – not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children’s books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.’ – Anita Shreve

‘I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There’s one in every town.’ – Seanan McGuire

‘On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems ‘Native Guard.’ I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.’ – Natasha Trethewey

‘I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.’ – James Mercer

‘It’s funny, we started writing chick-lit when it was just becoming a crowded marketplace, and now the same thing is happening with YA. It really used to just be one shelf at the library – Nancy Drew and Judy Blume.’ – Emma McLaughlin

‘The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It’s a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I’m writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I’m actually there and doing the writing.’ – Barry Eisler

‘In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve… or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.’ – David Weinberger

‘I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.’ – Ray Bradbury

‘I don’t really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.’ – Steve Toltz

‘The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as ‘religious.’ – John Drane’ – John Drane

‘While writing my memoir, ‘When Skateboards Will Be Free,’ I would sometimes have to pore over hours of microfilm at the New York Public Library in order to try to get one obscure detail right. For instance, was the Socialist Workers Party originally called the American Workers Party or the Workers Party of the United States?’ – Said Sayrafiezadeh

‘A family living at the poverty level is unlikely to be able to afford a computer at home. Even with a computer, access to the Internet is another significant expense. A child might borrow a book from a public library; but it is not possible to take a computer home.’ – Margaret Geller

‘From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.’ – Julia Glass

‘I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and ‘Little Women’ was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it’s such a sad book in so many ways. I’d cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings.’ – Helen Oyeyemi

‘One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.’ – Deb Caletti

‘I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!’ – Deb Caletti

‘Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that’s the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?’ – Seth Shostak

‘I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.’ – Maya Angelou

‘Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.’ – Maya Angelou

‘It was 1953, and I was still at school. I’d borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had ‘Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.” – Kevin Brownlow

‘If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There’s Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It’s pretty eclectic.’ – Chris Bohjalian

‘My mum was a children’s librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum’s work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.’ – Eleanor Catton

‘My interior is very, very dense – Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.’ – Hamish Bowles

‘In the past, a great library was the result of librarians functioning as guardians of culture, tending and caring, selecting and recommending works that maintained and nurtured a cultural heritage.’ – David Gerrold

‘I had a terrible fear of not being normal – of not seeming normal. So I went to the library and read every psychology book I could find. Anything about how normal people behave.’ – Woody Norris

‘My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’ It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.’ – Cynthia Ozick

‘The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.’ – Aaron Swartz

‘What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.’ – Aaron Swartz

‘My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon – this was before television, and we didn’t even have a radio – I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘I haven’t been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children’s literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin’s granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine – oil on canvas – in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother’s house.’ – Jill Lepore

‘I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.’ – Jill Lepore

‘I spent more time at the library than anyone my age when I was a kid.’ – Dave Sitek

‘Allegations that President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich partly in return for donations to his presidential library have raised questions about the value of such institutions and the federal appropriations that support them.’ – Robert Dallek

‘The London Library in Piccadilly is the best place for a sleep.’ – Sophie Winkleman

‘I have always been an obsessive reader – I remember going back and forth to the local library with stacks of books taller than I was.’ – Lisa Kleypas

‘I’m sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called ‘The Huey P. Newton Story,’ and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.’ – Tessa Thompson

‘Seeing Jennifer Holliday from ‘Dreamgirls’ perform on the Tony Awards telecast and later discovering Barbra Streisand by listening to her albums at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh really changed everything for me.’ – Billy Porter

‘Libraries have a PR problem – or at least that’s what they call it when no one under the age of 40 walks through the door. To bring in a younger crowd, the paper pushers have turned to tech to bring in the public. DVDs, CDs and, yes, even videogames are hitting the shelves of your local library.’ – Rob Manuel

‘I discovered Deborah Ellis’s books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.’ – Malala Yousafzai

‘I had a moment in the Library of Congress among the presidential papers. I opened a folder, and there was an envelope in it. The front of the envelope was facing the table, so I didn’t know what was in it. I opened it and out spilled all this hair. I turned the envelop over and it says, ‘Clipped from President Garfield’s head on his deathbed.” – Candice Millard

‘My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That’s what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.’ – Julianne Moore

”Anna Karenina.’ I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn’t stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.’ – Jonathan Dee

‘I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can’t get out.’ – Maeve Binchy

‘As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.’ – Cheech Marin

‘I’ve seen the most remarkable thing. It’s in the New York Public Library. They’ve got the original typescript of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ – all four acts of it.’ – Peter Shaffer

‘I once called construction companies to bid on an addition to the school library so that there would suddenly be people outside, measuring the building. ‘Who authorized this?’ the principal would ask. The answer: ‘Howie Mandel.” – Howie Mandel

‘Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.’ – Scott Turow

‘One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.’ – Jessye Norman

‘I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.’ – Richard K. Morgan

‘My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of ‘The Body In The Library.” – Sophie Hannah

‘I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn’t have a similar story to mine – transformation through the public library.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘As voters and taxpayers, we must demand that our local governments properly prioritize libraries. As citizens, we must invest in our library down the street so that the generations served by that library grow up to be adults who contribute not just to their local communities but to the world.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.’ – Alan Garner

‘Immigrants use the library often. A lot of them don’t have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so disconnected to the city.’ – Rabindranath Maharaj

‘I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.’ – Amy Bloom

‘In my opinion, right up there with free public schools, our free public library system is what makes citizenship possible, even what makes America great.’ – Karen DeCrow

‘I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.’ – Dale T. Mortensen

‘I had no inclination to perform as a kid. I was a shy child – I always had my nose in a library book. I didn’t start acting until I went to college. Once I started, it seemed to fit like a glove. I felt completely at home on stage. It was the perfect way for me to express myself, even better than writing.’ – Colman Domingo

‘When I won my way to the international science fair, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It was the first time I was going to be away from home, the first time taking an airplane. I went to the local library, checked out every single etiquette book, and I read those books like I was uncovering some sort of treasure.’ – Charles M. Blow

‘I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service – each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.’ – Garry Disher

‘To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids’ novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.’ – Cynthia Voigt

‘You don’t go to the library and walk along and pick out a topic. You are riding the bus, or shopping at Safeway, and all of a sudden the idea comes to you.’ – Edward P. Jones

‘Youku Tudou is a hybrid, like combining Netflix and YouTube. Like Netflix, with Youku, which launched in 2005, we syndicate a library of longform content and create original content. The Tudou model started with user-generated content but is increasingly becoming about partner-generated programming.’ – Victor Koo

‘The combined entity Youku Tudou Inc. represents a dominant leader in online video sector in China with the largest user base, most comprehensive content library, most advanced bandwidth infrastructure, and most effective monetization capability.’ – Victor Koo

‘With the scale of our traffic, content library and monetization ability, we are confident to see profitable growth in the future.’ – Victor Koo

‘I never imagined I’d go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven.’ – Lesley Nicol

‘I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian’s quiet smile as I’d bring back one stack and exchange it for another.’ – Victoria Hanley

‘I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was ‘Detroit Rock City.’ I heard it in the school library, where I lived.’ – Brian Posehn

‘You can spend a day in a library and feel: ‘Great, I’ve done a day’s work.’ But it’s only research, not writing.’ – Richard Flanagan

‘I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.’ – Chelsea Cain

‘Every night, I was read to. Every Friday, we were taken to the library. I always received at least one book for my birthday. I have a few of them yet. Early on, I had my own collection of books. I loved to read. Still do.’ – Avi

‘For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.’ – Avi

‘I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.’ – Hans-Ulrich Obrist

‘There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you’re open to them.’ – Ruth Reichl

‘When I was 10, my father had to go to the local library to sign a release form stating that I was allowed to borrow books from the adult section.’ – Terry Hayes

‘I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn’t want to spend my life in the library.’ – Janet Fitch

‘Sometimes I’m asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.’ – Jerry Spinelli

‘I have no personal agenda in whether or not a library keeps ‘Whale Talk’ or ‘Athletic Shorts’ or any of my books shelved.’ – Chris Crutcher

‘What I would like to do is make sure every primary school child has a library card, so where parents don’t get their children library cards, we’ll see if we can get schools to step in and make sure that every child has one.’ – Malorie Blackman

‘I started reading seriously at seven or eight, books about myths and legends, the Narnia series. By the time I was 11, I had read all the children’s books in my local library, so I moved on to ‘Jane Eyre.’ What I loved about Jane Eyre was that she didn’t rely on her looks but her character. She had a spirit nobody could break.’ – Malorie Blackman

‘I didn’t even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn’t afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.’ – Malorie Blackman

‘I have encountered those who feel that libraries have served their purpose and are no longer needed. There are those who consider them a soft target when it comes to local authority budget cuts. In certain political quarters, there is a refusal to see that our public library service needs active protection.’ – Malorie Blackman

‘I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.’ – Philip Kerr

‘L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border.’ – Meghan Daum

‘During my long study sessions in the library, I found myself watching YouTube videos during study breaks.’ – Ray William Johnson

‘I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She’s a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.’ – Juicy J

‘I think for Amazon’s customers, it offers a kind of addictive service – the ability to shop without leaving your house, the ability to read without going to a bookstore or a library.’ – Brad Stone

‘My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse’s ‘The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,’ which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.’ – Rashid Johnson

‘I read the ‘New Yorker’ when I was a kid. I used to love the cartoons and pick the cartoons out of the library, so I felt I knew the world of their cartoons.’ – Bruce Eric Kaplan

‘I dropped off my kids from 10 to 2, went to the library, and just wrote. This is my second career – I’m 41 – and I’m a terrible speller.’ – Isabel Gillies

‘I know I’m representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.’ – Juan Felipe Herrera

‘The goal for me is to be as expansive as possible, and the Library of Congress offers so many resources.’ – Juan Felipe Herrera

‘I want to take everything I have in me, weave it, merge it with the beauty that is in the Library of Congress, all the resources, the guidance of the staff and departments, and launch it with the heart-shaped dreams of the people.’ – Juan Felipe Herrera

‘At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader’s Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new.’ – Elizabeth McCracken

‘There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.’ – Elizabeth McCracken

”Jane Eyre’ must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And ‘Kristin Lavransdatter,’ and ‘Lorna Doone’ when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it.’ – Sue Miller

‘I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader – I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.’ – John Niven

‘Typically, if you buy a studio with a library, their library is pretty well licensed out many years in advance, so you are not really gaining access to the programming in that way.’ – Ted Sarandos

‘Google’s library plan was staggering and exciting – it wasn’t the idea I objected to, but the method.’ – Nick Harkaway

‘I got these big coffee table books about Chinese opera from the local library, and I loved looking through them. I loved studying the intricate costumes and figuring out how to ‘cartoonify’ them.’ – Gene Luen Yang

‘For ‘Boxers & Saints,’ I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.’ – Gene Luen Yang

‘We continually hear from our engaged customer base that Shutterstock’s content is a true differentiator, given not only the size of the library but also the quality and diversity of the images we offer.’ – Jon Oringer

‘While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that’s submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.’ – Jon Oringer

‘In the 1940s, I was doing something called the Equity Library Theater in New York, when a movie company came to see the play I was in and offered me a contract. But the deal was, my nose was too big and they wanted me to have surgery. My jaw was crooked, and I’d have to have that fixed, too. And they didn’t like my name; it was too common.’ – Elizabeth Wilson

‘I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I’ve used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn’t decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.’ – Steven Millhauser

‘Too much research can be the writer’s enemy. You can spend days on end in the British Library or prowling the streets with a Dictaphone, and it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re working hard. Often, it can be an excuse not to work; a classic displacement activity.’ – Mark Billingham

‘My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they’ve sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.’ – Susanna Kearsley

‘My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god’s hammer.’ – Dave Morris

‘I started creative writing classes at Aberdeen Central Library, and the writer-in-residence there, Todd McEwen, encouraged me a great deal. He showed my stories to his editor, and I thought that was just what happened to everyone who took his classes!’ – Leila Aboulela

‘ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It’s like a large living library of geographic information.’ – Jack Dangermond

‘I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers’ Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.’ – Kate Thompson

‘My first contact with game theory was a popular article in ‘Fortune Magazine’ which I read in my last high school year. I was immediately attracted to the subject matter, and when I studied mathematics, I found the fundamental book by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the library and studied it.’ – Reinhard Selten

‘One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell’s unknown and untranslated dissertation, ‘Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,’ buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago’s old Harper Library.’ – James M. Buchanan

‘We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library.’ – Irwin Rose

‘In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.’ – Romesh Gunesekera

‘I’d go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she’d turn my head into a snow globe.’ – Andrea Seigel

‘Just as it can be addictive to be in a real world bookstore or library, it’s the same on the Web.’ – Trip Adler

‘We see ourselves as the world’s digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.’ – Trip Adler

‘I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn’t occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn’t think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.’ – Geraldine McCaughrean

‘Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library’s Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.’ – Karl Schroeder

‘When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.’ – Michael Dirda

‘A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.’ – Michael Dirda

‘I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.’ – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

‘My YouTube channel is kind of a library of all my issues I’ve lived with. To process it emotionally, it’s been good and bad.’ – Anna Akana

‘I was really into ’24’ at university, and it resulted in a lot of lost hours that could have been spent at the library. If you could have told me then I would be in it one day, I’d have hit the roof.’ – Emily Berrington

”Forever Amber,’ written by Kathleen Winsor in 1944, was banned in Boston at the time of its publication as obscene and offensive. This alone would have been enough to excite my interest, but in 1956, it was sitting inoffensively on the shelves of the small country library on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where my family spent its summers.’ – Susanna Moore

‘There must be a little memory bank, a library or storage unit in my brain, that just tucks away memories of other people. I suck in as much of life as I can. I don’t do it deliberately – I’m just curious. Dangerously so. I collect visual and aural patterns, physical human patterns, from experience.’ – Debra Lawrance

‘Our house has a library – it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! – and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There’s nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.’ – Adam Christopher

‘My kids have grown up knowing that their mom made a big investment in making sure there was art and language instruction in school and books in the library. Hopefully, they’ve internalized that.’ – Elise Broach

‘My first book, ‘Contest,’ had a guy fighting aliens in the New York Public Library. The second book, ‘Ice Station,’ and ‘Temple’ were present-day military thrillers.’ – Matthew Reilly

‘The New York Public Library is a wonderful gem. I go there to get away from the bustle of the city. They have an incredible collection of menus from all over the city.’ – Daniel Humm

‘First, we would reposition UPI by bringing it into the 21st century with new technology. And second would be to better utilize its assets, like the library and archives, which have terrific value.’ – Leon Charney

‘I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library’s science fictional and fantastic holdings.’ – Ann Leckie

‘At some point, I picked up an old library copy of ‘To The Lighthouse’ someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn’t stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.’ – Lauren Groff

‘I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it’s started to thrive.’ – Margaret Stohl

‘We never had a giant library or owned a lot of commercial characters the way most studios did. And since we didn’t have a lot of internal resources, we had to find ways to be inventive and resourceful, which I think is a healthy way to run a good business.’ – Toby Emmerich

‘As a kid, I went from reading kids’ books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.’ – John Allison

‘I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there’s this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I’ve also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.’ – Sally Mann

‘I like to compare ‘Instagram’ to the Library of Congress.’ – Kevin Systrom

‘The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.’ – Arthur Quiller-Couch

‘Television is like a library. There are a lot of library books in it, and you have to pick and choose what you take out of it.’ – David L. Wolper

‘I always wanted to be a children’s author, and I have a really big library of children’s books. All the ones from when I was little, they are just so beautiful. I read kids’ books, and they calm me down.’ – Jenny Slate

‘My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn’t represented in my home, and I wanted it to be.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.’ – Judy Blume

‘There should not be a micro-managing of terminology with the Library of Congress.’ – Tom Graves

‘In 2009, I edited, under the aegis of the Library of America, an anthology called ‘Becoming Americans: Immigrants Tell Their Stories from Jamestown to Today.’ It featured immigrants from different backgrounds, from black slaves like Phillis Wheatley to Yiddish-language speakers like Henry Roth.’ – Ilan Stavans

‘Maybe they’re not ‘books,’ but ‘Acme Novelty Library’ and ‘Eightball’ are two comics I can’t get enough of.’ – Christopher McCulloch

‘The Bodleian Library, next to the Sheldonian, is one of the great libraries of the world. As well as holding most of the books printed in England since the first quarter of the 17th century, it houses priceless printed texts, manuscripts, and collections.’ – Justin Cartwright

‘If I was at home, I’d find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with.’ – Justin Cartwright

‘The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, ‘My gosh, all these books!’ The classroom and school had a library; I’d never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn’t have in the township.’ – Petina Gappah

‘The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.’ – Adrienne Mayor

‘The Internet has kind of allowed me to go to a virtual library whenever I want to find out something about something and not use one source but find multiple ways to research certain topics or subjects.’ – Curt Schilling

‘I’ve become completely obsessed with Netflix original programming. ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ are two of my new favorite shows. I also love having access to such an amazing library of film and television and have watched some truly enlightening documentaries.’ – Claire Holt

‘You read a book, write a detailed review as proof you’ve read it, and they give you a badge. That’s where my competitive nature came out. Give me the badges! I would sit in the library all day, not ‘cos I loved reading, just because I needed those badges.’ – Stormzy

‘The public library is where I studied. It’s where my grandfather taught himself English.’ – Gina Raimondo

‘Those diplomas on my wall would not be there without the GI Bill that educated my father, without the public library, without the RIPTA bus.’ – Gina Raimondo

‘The end of ‘Hollow City’ left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that’s just where ‘Library of Souls’ begins.’ – Ransom Riggs

”Library of Souls’ is longer than ‘Hollow City’ by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.’ – Ransom Riggs

‘The notion of a writer sitting in a library doing research isn’t what I want. The research I love doing isn’t found in a book. It’s what it feels like to rappel down the side of a building; to train with a SWAT team; to hold a human brain in your hands; or to dive for pirate treasure. Those are things I’ve done to research my stories.’ – Marcus Sakey

‘Really, having a show freely available online is like having your book in the library. It’s wonderful; it’s ideal.’ – Whit Stillman

‘If I had millions and millions and millions of dollars, I’d leave a large portion to the 42nd Street library. That’s why – that was my hangout, the reading rooms, the North and South reading rooms. I’d go there, and my God, I couldn’t believe I had access to all of these books. That was my university.’ – Frank McCourt

‘My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that’s all.’ – Frank McCourt

‘I went to the library and learned how checks work. I found out that routing numbers are like zip codes: the checks are sent to the bank that correlates to the routing number. If I manipulate those numbers to a bank far away, it would take longer to get back to the bank, which gave me more time to write more bad checks.’ – Frank Abagnale

‘Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I’d find two or three books to bring home.’ – James Blaylock

‘After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad’s an English professor. After a year there, I was like, ‘Jesus. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be in the library.’ So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.’ – Nathaniel Philbrick

‘I read a lot about her. I read a lot of bios. I read bios about the royal family; I read this little novella called ‘The Uncommon Reader,’ which is a fiction: it’s about Queen Elizabeth going on this library bus and choosing books and reading them, but it’s so sweet.’ – Sarah Gadon

‘When I was 14, I saw a library for the first time.’ – Sayed Kashua

‘We got a copy of the ‘New Statesman’ at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The ‘Statesman’ came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.’ – Melvyn Bragg

‘I wasn’t a great student, but I was interested in this theater thing, and I could spend hours in the library researching why the cuffs in the 18th century had four buttons. It was my handle.’ – Jimmy Smits

‘I dropped out of school, but I didn’t drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world… I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.’ – August Wilson

‘I just remember really loving words and writing about anything I could, and the way I’d remember things, like my library card number, was to make a melody.’ – Julia Michaels

‘I collect musical theatre anthologies. I have a whole library of them.’ – Tituss Burgess

‘I wanted to sail when I was in grammar school and well remember memorizing the names of the sails from the Merriam-Webster’s ponderous dictionary in the library. Now I am actually at sea – as a passenger, of course, but at sea nevertheless – and bound for Ecuador.’ – Jim Elliot

‘I got into history when I was 11 years old, and it all started with the Titanic. I’d read books in the library about it. Of course I’ve seen the movie, too – I don’t think I’ve ever cried that much.’ – Katherine Langford

‘I think, Queen Victoria’s diaries, I think you can get them if you go to the British Library.’ – Claire Foy

‘I prefer a change of surroundings anyway, and I like to be around some energy and white noise, so I usually go to a Barnes & Noble cafe or to the library on 5th and 42nd. In the afternoons, I do research, reading, editing, and play with the kids.’ – Douglas Brunt

‘You go to your public library, or you call your fire department or police department, what do you think you are calling? These are socialist institutions.’ – Bernie Sanders

‘For many children, the library represents their only access to books, reading, and the Internet outside of their home. If you think about how far behind a child would be without access to these fundamental tools – tools that are vital to successful employment later in life – it’s a travesty.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, ‘I want to do that.” – Karin Slaughter

‘I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid – my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘When I became a published writer, I said, ‘Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,’ so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don’t make money – they just barely break even.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It’s such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where for the first time in my life I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books. This was where I discovered ‘Encyclopedia Brown’ and ‘Nancy Drew,’ ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Rebecca.’ This was where I became inspired to be a writer.’ – Karin Slaughter

‘In elementary school, I read every single space book in the library about all the planets, about nebulas, about black holes. So for as long as I can remember, I’ve been just looking up at the stars and wondering what’s out there and even what may be looking back at us.’ – Sunil Nagaraj

‘Words about Lincoln fill a small but ever-growing library.’ – Fred Kaplan

‘Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn’t just spring out of the library shelves.’ – Diana Gabaldon

‘When I turned 35, I thought, ‘Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I’m going to start writing a book on my next birthday.’ I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.’ – Diana Gabaldon

‘I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.’ – Glenne Headly

‘The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.’ – Adriana Trigiani

‘Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.’ – Angelina Jolie

‘There was a library near us in San Francisco. It was the West Portal Public Library. I would ask my father to drive me there at night and pick me up when it closed. I think he was worried about this routine but never let on. Also, I kept this a secret from my friends, as I don’t think it would have been considered the ‘coolest’ habit.’ – Jeffrey Tambor

‘When I go out shopping and pass a bookstore, I always grab a couple of cookbooks, so I have a library of them. I end up keeping many that I got years and years ago because they work so well.’ – Johnny Mathis

‘My biggest challenges when I first started out were not having a computer or camera or Wi-Fi! The computer and the camera had to be borrowed, and there were times that I used the computer at the library, and I literally sat outside people’s houses to steal their Internet connections.’ – GloZell

‘My ideal beach house has bookshelves full of paperbacks that can tolerate a little sand, a DVD library that includes some Disney classics for the little ones, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. At least one big flatscreen television is a must.’ – Mary Kay Andrews

‘I’ve always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” – Gillian Flynn

‘I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.’ – Ellen Ullman

‘If you’re rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.’ – Claire Messud

‘Without the library, I would have been lost.’ – Jesmyn Ward

‘My music library is all over the place. I’ve got A$AP Rocky; I’ve got Billy Joel. I’ve got, like, Celine Dion albums that I just worship. There’s all kinds of different stuff.’ – Brendon Urie

‘I learned how to read in second grade, and I entered a summer contest at my local library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If you read more books than anybody else, you got your Polaroid up on the bulletin board, and I did.’ – Frances McDormand

‘I worry about Google’s data ethics and about the idea of handing over the corpus of my life, but I can’t deny that it is exceptional at making sense of my ever-growing photo library.’ – Om Malik

‘I love to get in the library and just spend days researching characters.’ – Jurnee Smollett-Bell

‘I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she’d say ‘Ulysses’ or something, I’d run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.’ – Stephen Hough

‘Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn’t even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.’ – Angus Young

‘Every Sunday on Channel 6 in Guadalajara, where I lived, they dedicated most every Sunday to black-and-white horror films and sci-fi. So I watched them. I watched ‘Tarantula.’ I watched ‘The Monolith Monsters.’ I watched all the Universal library.’ – Guillermo del Toro

‘Owning content and original content has been our lifeblood – we’ve never been a suite of brands that’s been reliant on a movie library or on rented series from other networks.’ – Nancy Dubuc

‘I was an engineering student and spent a lot of time in the library, and no one applauds when you finish your calculations.’ – Andre Braugher

‘My grandmother had a Ph.D in library science, so I grew up in a library, and I would appreciate those books and the smell of them and how they’d have these series, and it was cool to me. I always felt like, if I had an opportunity, I’d create an album that felt like a series.’ – Dawn Richard

‘I lived in the library with my grandmother as a child. I still love the smell of books; the library card is still my friend.’ – Dawn Richard

‘When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn’t say anything.’ – James Carville

‘When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.’ – James Carville

‘My parents are both intellectuals and readers; my mother would take me to the library every few days from before I was one year old.’ – Naomi Alderman

‘I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.’ – Naomi Alderman

‘Fridays after school, especially when the weather was lousy, Mom would take me to the library. She’d let me check out whatever I wanted, and I checked out a lot.’ – Anthony Doerr

‘Think of a public library, worth more for those who cannot afford numerous books. Think of a public waterway or fishing ground. All types of commons have imputed monetary value that together comprise a source of social income. As such, the commons reduces economic inequality and insecurity in society.’ – Guy Standing

‘As a fan, I hated most of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ movie except for the part where Emmy Rossum and Jake Gyllenhaal were stuck in the library, and I thought, ‘Oh, I like this now.’ There’s something about bringing people together in odd circumstances and exploring the petri dish of what happens.’ – Julie Plec

‘I grew up as an avid reader. I would go to the library and check out 40 books a week. Some of them were smarty books; most of them were ‘Sweet Valley High’ and young teen romance.’ – Julie Plec

‘I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library – the public library – twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.’ – Kate DiCamillo

‘Whenever I am with a group of kids, I always ask them, ‘How many of you know about the summer reading program at your library and how many of you know it’s free?’ Spreading that sort of message comes very naturally to me.’ – Kate DiCamillo

‘I try to write every day, preferably first thing in the morning. Of course, there are days when something happens to interfere with this ideal schedule. Then I try to find time later in the day. I usually work at home, but sometimes, for a change I’ll go to a library or a cafe. And I like to read poetry before I sit down to write.’ – Sigrid Nunez

‘I didn’t know Penn was an Ivy League school – I didn’t know what the Ivy League was. When I got in, they sent me the package, and the tuition was my mother’s salary for a year. My mom said, ‘We can’t afford it.’ So I went to the library and found several scholarships and grants and was able to cover 90 percent of my education that way.’ – Stacy Brown-Philpot

‘The library companies have made it so that music is so cheap to license. They do sound-alikes of every band, and it makes it harder for the actual bands to get any decent paychecks for licensing.’ – Brian Reitzell

‘I was fired from my first job in New York. I was just out of school, doing the Welsh play, ‘The Corn Is Green,’ at Equity Library Theater. I was studying with Uta Hagen, and I was really working well, but they got nervous. They wanted results right away. We had a run-through, and I wasn’t there yet, so they fired me.’ – Barbara Barrie

‘Every day, no matter how tired my father was, he’d put me in the car and drive me to Schaumburg Public Library, and he’d read to me from books about Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt.’ – Reshma Saujani

‘I have been involved in lots of crossover and event books, and the truth is, I dearly love them. I love stories that actually take advantage of the huge DC library and catalog – that stuff thrills me.’ – Gail Simone

‘With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.’ – Steve Rushin

‘When I was nine, I found a copy of ‘Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series’ in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.’ – Mike Bartlett

‘We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.’ – Anne Waldman

‘When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was ‘D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.” – Robin Sloan

‘In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.’ – Robin Sloan

‘I’ve always been a ravenous consumer of opinion. When I was in my high school library and my college library, I would read ‘National Review’ and I would read ‘The Nation’ and I would read ‘The American Spectator’ and I would read ‘Mother Jones.” – Jake Tapper

‘When I think about music in the future, I don’t make a distinction between what’s radio, what used to be the music library, and so on.’ – Daniel Ek

‘I remember, as a kid, I couldn’t wait to get my library card, get my first book. There was a sphinx on the cover, and I figured I was going to read about the Egyptians. But it was this archeology. It was so dry. But I forced myself to read it because it was my first book out of the library. Should have gotten a ‘Hardy Boys.” – Keith Hernandez

‘My house is like a manga library in many ways, and it’s great because I get to call it research.’ – Masi Oka

‘To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.’ – Mona Eltahawy

‘I started doing a Ph.D., and then I thought, ‘I don’t really want to spend all this time on my own in the library.” – Gail Honeyman

‘Every weekend from, like, 1974 to 1978, I’d trudge over to the Greenwich library, which gathered up almost every major newspaper in the country. I would sit there all day long and read and read and read the reviews. I remember being twelve or thirteen and writing to Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert.’ – Rod Lurie

‘Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you’re just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.’ – Elizabeth Berg

‘When I was coming to terms with my sexuality, I often felt like I needed to seek out sanctuary outside of my house, and the library was the first place I went. It was a place that I could go and seek out information and look for answers to questions that maybe I was too afraid to ask another person.’ – Camille Perri

‘Sometimes we’d just play acoustic guitar and try out the parts and make a library. We’d use a double cassette player and make little edits.’ – Kate Pierson

‘People say it’s a quiet flow, that it sounds like I’m in a library. That could have come from when I was living in my old place, a nice loft. I was the youngest person in the building, and I would be working alone on my music. I would get emails two or three times a month about ‘loud’ music, so I became quieter and quieter about making beats.’ – Valee

‘When I think about it, I was working very hard the summer before I applied to graduate school. I was going to the library every day in the summer. I read a play a day for about three months. I was taking audition classes, and I was reciting lines to myself and acting as my own scene partner. But I was having fun.’ – Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

‘Kissinger’s monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger’s Library of Congress cache.’ – Michael Beschloss

‘I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book ‘Great Negroes, Past and Present’ in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade.’ – Kerry James Marshall

‘When you grow up looking at Superman, Batman, and all those superheroes, you take it for granted that is what superheroes are supposed to be. So then, when I see art books at the library, and I’m seeing Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, I think that’s what artists look like.’ – Kerry James Marshall

‘By about age 12, I would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep. I started learning. I started going to the library and reading. But it was initially just watching the stars from my bedroom that I really did. There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night.’ – Vera Rubin

‘In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom.’ – Andrew Shaffer

‘I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.’ – Donovan

‘My parents were really poor. We never bought books because you could go to the library. It would be stupid to buy one.’ – Beth Macy

‘At one point, I got to work as an assistant for Martin Scorsese: He wanted to know about all the films coming out, so I would make clippings and put it all in a big scrapbook for him. I was also in charge of his video library – it was like a little video store, and his friends and colleagues would come and borrow films.’ – Michael Imperioli

‘The reason we didn’t acquire WCW is an incoming, rotating door, new head of Turner at that time, took prime time television literally out of the deal that we had already negotiated. Once that happened, there was no way to make any sense of it. It was really just a video library and some ring mats.’ – Eric Bischoff

‘I spent many, many hours in the stack at the University of Washington library just wandering around, when my dad was working, as a kid.’ – Paul Allen

‘Some of my first memories are waiting for my father to finish his day at work in the University of Washington library and come out and jump in the car with my mom and myself, and we’d be sitting there reading books, and then we’d go home.’ – Paul Allen

‘In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from ’60 to ’82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.’ – Paul Allen

‘I get asked a lot what books I recommend for a nursery, home library, etc., and I always tell parents to start with what they loved as children, what they want to share, and broaden out from there.’ – Rebecca Serle

‘The Boston run of ‘Lolita, My Love’ ended after a mere nine performances – though one of them was recorded at decent enough quality to be preserved by the New York Public Library.’ – Sarah Weinman

‘I found a ‘lost’ manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee’s interest in magic. Of course, it wasn’t really lost. It was there, in the catalog.’ – Deborah Harkness

‘I was always the person in our class who was fascinated by new plays. I would go to the library all the time as new plays would come out.’ – Joe Mantello

‘My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.’ – Steven Berkoff

‘I was a little tomboy, growing up, but we had to go to the library every weekend if we wanted some form of entertainment. And I would gravitate towards the Shirley Temple, Judy Garland section of the library, and I would just pop that in and watch on replay because kids can watch movies over and over again.’ – Isabela Moner

‘Being attracted to my own sex was as much part of who I was as being short or blonde or drawn to the library, but I was made to grow up feeling ‘other.’ Most books, films – even advertisements – didn’t reflect how I felt, and I often watched the world from the outside.’ – Sandi Toksvig

‘It’s always a treat for me to go to the British Library.’ – Sue Perkins

‘My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man. He was very much not quiet, not shy, not passive. If he had to fart, he’d do it in the library. He did not care. He was like, ‘I don’t know these people. I’m uncomfortable, and I need to let it go.” – Ali Wong

‘I worked in restaurants, and I worked in the Cambridge Public Library.’ – H. Jon Benjamin

‘Nintendo has an enviable position of having the best franchises in this industry in terms of ‘Mario’ and ‘Zelda’ and ‘Metroid’ and ‘Donkey Kong’ and all of those great franchises. Together, those are a library that any developer would kill for.’ – Reggie Fils-Aime

‘Filmmaking has been my love since my mother brought me to see James Whale’s ‘Frankenstein’ at the local library at the age of six.’ – Sean Baker

‘I traveled to a library in South Africa called ILAM (International Library of African Music), which has a collection of about 500 different instruments that don’t really exist anymore.’ – Ludwig Goransson

‘For good or ill, communism transformed the globe, but how many of us realise the crucial role played by a Manchester public library – Chethams, the oldest library in the English-speaking world – in the honing of that ideology? – Michael Portillo’ – Michael Portillo

‘I went to the library – and this was before the Internet – and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.’ – Jamie Hyneman

‘Boston had the first public library, Liverpool had the first lending library. Both cities have pioneered medical advancements during the decades and both have the largest economic powers in the world exactly 213 miles to the south by car.’ – John W. Henry

‘I used to steal from the library, which is a crime and it’s bad, but I just couldn’t get enough books, and I also didn’t like to give them back once I’d read them. I just read everything.’ – Sara Pascoe

‘In reality, handing over public space to private developers does not guarantee that new library spaces will be comparable in size or otherwise remain fully-functional.’ – Letitia James

‘I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster, I would look through these books in the library and dream about visiting Loch Ness one day… That stuff was really kind of what I loved as a kid.’ – Alex Hirsch

‘I found a book in my elementary school library when I was ten called ‘All about You’ which was a book on the human body. I was hooked.’ – Steven Gundry

‘The tradition, particularly in old-school British detective things, is everybody’s in the drawing room or the library, and they’re all gathered, and the detective walks around and tells them where they were that night, and you see the flashbacks.’ – Chris Chibnall

‘The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.’ – Alice Roberts

‘After 20 years and 250 mainstream films, I thought I should have in my library at least 50 films, films that will be talked about when I am no more.’ – Prosenjit Chatterjee

‘Growing up, I would take out books from the school library and hide them in the hamper. I’d wait until my parents fell asleep, and then I’d sneak into the bathroom, turn on the light, and dig out the books and read all night.’ – Lisa Joy

‘I have a library, and it’s like I want to beat Belle on ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and have a better library than she had.’ – Martellus Bennett

‘There aren’t many children’s books about black characters that are just going on adventures. My library has over 2,000 children’s books in it, and most of the protagonists are either white or creatures.’ – Martellus Bennett

‘I’m an artist, not a rapper… so my musical genres and library is way beyond the normal rapper.’ – Redman

‘I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it. I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.’ – James Holzhauer

‘Starting out so young meant missing out on a lot of things that kids do, that your friends are doing, whether it was playing team sports or school dances with friends. I remember having fights with my mother when I was young about ‘Why can’t I just go have frozen yogurt with my friends after school and go hit on the girls at the library?” – Dante Basco

‘I predict that you students who are burning out from the pressure to fix upon a career choice as early as possible and tailor your studies accordingly, will find relief for a few hours here and there in a great library.’ – Hilary Farr

‘I always said it was my ambition to have a library – I have one – and my dream was to have a pool. Then ‘Strictly’ came along.’ – Ann Widdecombe

‘A well-run, well-stocked library with access to great books as well as the Internet is essential.’ – Munira Mirza

‘London centre has a wealth of creative activity but there are parts of London where there isn’t a cinema or where library provision is quite weak.’ – Munira Mirza

‘The Woodruff Library Archives has done a phenomenal job archiving my son’s materials.’ – Afeni Shakur

‘Stephen King’s ‘It’ is my favorite book of all time. I was that kid that would come to the library and be like: ‘There’s more Stephen King? Great.” – Misha Green

‘We’ve always read to the kids, every night both kids get books. That’s really important, and they love books. Our daughter is obsessed with reading and books, so it’s really sweet. She has her own little personal library.’ – Jeremiah Brent

‘Some people are made to be famous and do photo shoots, but I’m not one of them. I’m more comfortable in the library!’ – Georgia Toffolo

‘It wasn’t that long ago that I was coming up, but it feels almost ancient that you had to go to the library and you had ‘World Book Encyclopedias.” – Rick Famuyiwa

‘The school I attended, Bedales, was fortunate to have been built by a leading light from the Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1890s. It contained a beautiful library, made originally of green oak and constructed with the help of the children.’ – David Linley

‘The Kingsway Music Library was sort of a byproduct of all the creation I was doing. As creators, we kind of just create blindly sometimes and I couldn’t physically see every idea through, so I created this ecosystem where I made the ideas available to people to download, to sample and to put their own twist on it.’ – Frank Dukes

‘I don’t really generate material specifically for the Kingsway Music Library. It’s just a product of the way I work.’ – Frank Dukes

‘Everything started with my mom. When I was five, she asked me if I wanted to sign up for soccer, but I had some pretty wild contract demands. ‘I’ll only play if you’re my coach.’ So my mom went to the library and brought home a bunch of books on how to coach soccer, and that was it. She was my first manager.’ – Lindsey Horan

‘We’ve conflated football games with patriotic zeal. I don’t think attending a football game is any more patriotic than walking down the street to my local library. It’s just another activity we all enjoy.’ – Oliver Luck

‘I remember that children in my class would hate the English club, whereas I was always found in the library.’ – Divya Khosla Kumar

‘It’s one thing looking up your own book in a library, but imagine being able to look up your own word in the dictionary.’ – Alex Horne

‘Listen, there’s been times in my life like the two years that I only listened to jazz, and probably nothing after 1966. When I went to the Manhattan School of Music, the library didn’t have anything after 1966. In order to get good at that, I had to tunnel-vision and focus on that.’ – Dr. Luke

‘I am trying to reach people who would not normally head for the history section of a book shop or a library to try to show that history would be as interesting and thrilling as a novel.’ – Princess Michael of Kent

‘I never used to be able to work on the road, I was always strictly in the studio. But not everything’s gotten smaller – I have Ableton on the laptop now and a sample library, which means I can use that downtime to pour it into the music.’ – Bonobo

‘The ability to have that mobility of music right now, where you can be in an airport with a sample library, it means that you can channel that mind-space you’re in when you’re overly tired and in an unfamiliar place.’ – Bonobo

‘I’m scared to go to library. I’m scared John Wick will show up and break my leg again.’ – Boban Marjanovic

‘Visitors to a future Donald J. Trump presidential library may find a whole section dedicated to his demolition of the 2015 Iran nuclear accord: ‘worst deal ever;’ ‘horrible’ and ‘one-sided;’ ‘major embarrassment;’ ‘defective at its core.” – Antony Blinken

‘When I went to university, I got work experience at my local radio station, and I used to spend hours in what was then the CD library. I was supposed to be filing the CDs, but I was actually randomly picking stuff up and blaring it out of the speakers.’ – Edith Bowman

‘I grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl in South Wales, the third eldest of four children. We weren’t overly bookworm-ish but I found the library magical – and I thought librarians earned their wages from book fines!’ – Ruth Jones

‘Public libraries are critical learning centers for New Mexicans that bring communities together, especially in our rural regions that depend on library technologies.’ – Ben Ray Lujan

‘When the other girls had physical or practical classes like PE, drama or science, I would spend the lessons in the library, alone.’ – Liz Carr

‘Look, a lot of people in my grandfather’s position would have chosen to go out and be really wild with their spending and do a lot of crazy things. But instead, he chose to give back to the community, whether it was the public schools of St. Louis, the library, the zoo, or the science center or you name it.’ – David Lee

‘There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president, as a celebrity, is supposed to weigh in in every local issue that could be solved by the library board, could be solved by the city council, could by solved by a township board, or it could be solved by the parents.’ – Doug Burgum

‘We need a president that’s focused on the challenges that we’re being faced as a nation – not a president that’s going to decide whether a book is in the right section or not in a library in a small town somewhere in America.’ – Doug Burgum