“Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.”

“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.”

“Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?”

“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and… would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.”

“Superstition lives longer than books, it is engraved on the human mind 'til it becomes a part of its existence.”

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

“But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.”

“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

“When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.”

“Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madames, greeting the punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs and then pimping their books.”