A library implies an act of faith.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
I don’t have sophisticated tastes. I have average tastes. If you looked in my collection of DVDs, you’d see ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars.’ In the book library, you’d see John Grisham and Sidney Sheldon. And if you look in my fridge, it’s, like, children’s food – chips, milkshakes, yogurt.
I read a lot about her. I read a lot of bios. I read bios about the royal family; I read this little novella called ‘The Uncommon Reader,’ which is a fiction: it’s about Queen Elizabeth going on this library bus and choosing books and reading them, but it’s so sweet.
As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children’s library until I finished the children’s library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.
Owning content and original content has been our lifeblood – we’ve never been a suite of brands that’s been reliant on a movie library or on rented series from other networks.
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
As a child, I wanted only two things – to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was ‘D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.’
I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.
In my opinion, right up there with free public schools, our free public library system is what makes citizenship possible, even what makes America great.
If there’s a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we’ll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we’re going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother’s house that night for dinner.
I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.
After 20 years and 250 mainstream films, I thought I should have in my library at least 50 films, films that will be talked about when I am no more.
The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.
People go back to the stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don’t have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
My stepfather introduced me to The London Library when I was about 18; the clientele has definitely changed since then, but it is still a wonderful oasis in the middle of London.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don’t get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.
I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I’ve used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn’t decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.
However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.
I got hit by the bug of reading – not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children’s books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
I want all my stuff to be converted into digital format so I can have my reference library to carry with me wherever I go.
I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don’t make money – they just barely break even.
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.
The goal for me is to be as expansive as possible, and the Library of Congress offers so many resources.
I got these big coffee table books about Chinese opera from the local library, and I loved looking through them. I loved studying the intricate costumes and figuring out how to ‘cartoonify’ them.
The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
I didn’t belong to the sort of family where the children’s classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.
The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one’s children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.
I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.
In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve… or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.
I had a terrible fear of not being normal – of not seeming normal. So I went to the library and read every psychology book I could find. Anything about how normal people behave.
When I won my way to the international science fair, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It was the first time I was going to be away from home, the first time taking an airplane. I went to the local library, checked out every single etiquette book, and I read those books like I was uncovering some sort of treasure.
Those diplomas on my wall would not be there without the GI Bill that educated my father, without the public library, without the RIPTA bus.
To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist texts on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything.
Why buy a book when you can join a library.
Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.
I always said it was my ambition to have a library – I have one – and my dream was to have a pool. Then ‘Strictly’ came along.
Why buy a book when you can join a library.
I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.
London centre has a wealth of creative activity but there are parts of London where there isn’t a cinema or where library provision is quite weak.
London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world… It’s got everything you want, really.
