“It was the kind of library
he had only read about in 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.”

“sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it”

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

“He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.”

“What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?”

“Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.”

“I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”

“But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information. I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.”

“[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop… You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!”