“You took out a book on blow-job technique from the British Library? They shouldn't have books like that in there!”

“I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library.”

“Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“In one of the rooms of the Fortuny Palace there are eight books from Prospero's Library. They are magical books. In many senses all books are magical.”

“The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.”

“Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.”

“If you steal any of the books from the library, I will know, and you'll be sorry.
Jessamine Lovelace.”

“The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.”

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”