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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.
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.
And every book, you find, has its own social group - friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in a library that need never, ever end.
A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.
What has been happening the last four years in City Hall is that they have been closing recreation centers, closing libraries. We have not looked after our children in City Hall.
We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
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.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
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.
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.
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.
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
My own perception of that is somewhat colored by where people ask my advice, which is still, of course, about changes to Python internals or at least standard libraries.
I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]
