I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library’s science fictional and fantastic holdings.
My father was an engineer – he wasn’t literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world’s great readers. Every two weeks, he’d take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms – ‘Have you read this? And this? And this?’
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, ‘I want to do that.’
I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail.
Without the library, I would have been lost.
I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
The Kingsway Music Library was sort of a byproduct of all the creation I was doing. As creators, we kind of just create blindly sometimes and I couldn’t physically see every idea through, so I created this ecosystem where I made the ideas available to people to download, to sample and to put their own twist on it.
I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don’t belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs.
Really, having a show freely available online is like having your book in the library. It’s wonderful; it’s ideal.
If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they’d get bored in a day. ‘Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here’s Matt researching in aisle six of his local library’. A few hours of that and they’d go home.
What I would like to do is make sure every primary school child has a library card, so where parents don’t get their children library cards, we’ll see if we can get schools to step in and make sure that every child has one.
You read a book, write a detailed review as proof you’ve read it, and they give you a badge. That’s where my competitive nature came out. Give me the badges! I would sit in the library all day, not ‘cos I loved reading, just because I needed those badges.
I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I’m on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support.
An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.
Immersing myself in Shakespeare’s plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.
Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don’t think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there’s always a library.
In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don’t reach Africa and we are being left behind.
I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.
For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.
My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of ‘The Body In The Library.’
I’m not a library.
We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I’d read as many of those as I could.
When I go out shopping and pass a bookstore, I always grab a couple of cookbooks, so I have a library of them. I end up keeping many that I got years and years ago because they work so well.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn’t one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.
As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.
Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining.
I bought a former library, not because I have a lot of books, but also I like architecture, and it was built in 1965, and I like gardening.
Stephen King’s ‘It’ is my favorite book of all time. I was that kid that would come to the library and be like: ‘There’s more Stephen King? Great.’
Our house has a library – it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! – and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There’s nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
You don’t go to the library and walk along and pick out a topic. You are riding the bus, or shopping at Safeway, and all of a sudden the idea comes to you.
I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me – because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.
Your library is your paradise.
Yes, there’s such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o’clock in the morning. You’ll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o’clock in the morning.
I don’t think if you’re serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.
My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing – communication devices. I grew up between my father’s laboratory and my mother’s library.
I’ve got a vendetta to destroy the Net, to make everyone go to the library. I love the organic thing of pen and paper, ink on canvas. I love going down to the library, the feel and smell of books.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell’s unknown and untranslated dissertation, ‘Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen,’ buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago’s old Harper Library.
I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.
Typically, if you buy a studio with a library, their library is pretty well licensed out many years in advance, so you are not really gaining access to the programming in that way.
I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can’t get out.
When George W. Bush was president, his daddy was raising money for the Bush library. I thought that was fine. When Bob Dole was Majority Leader, Elizabeth Dole was the president of American Red Cross. I didn’t say anything.
To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids’ novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can’t go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can’t get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
I spent more time at the library than anyone my age when I was a kid.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
