“Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.”

“I have no time for babbling foolishness.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” said Victor. “There’s always time for babbling.”

“Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space…”

“I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake.
The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!”

“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 one book.”

“One day she's throwing a book at me. The next, we're making out behind the library.”

“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.”

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

“Many books in my library are now behind and beneath me. They were good in their way once, and so were the clothes I wore when I was ten years old; but I have outgrown them. Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.”

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”