A few books well chosen, and well made use of will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library

A library is a room where the murders take place.

Surrounded by stories surreal and sublime, I fell in Love in the Library once upon a time.

A library is infinity under a roof.

When in doubt, go to the library.

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1,500 or so books I possess.

I worked in restaurants, and I worked in the Cambridge Public Library.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

Thing is, I wasn’t in the library, didn’t study too much, didn’t get the best grades, but honestly, I didn’t party a lot either. I stayed in a lot.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.

How we use the knowledge we gain determines our progress on earth, in space or on the moon. Your library is a storehouse for mind and spirit. Use it well.

The greatest moment of my life was when I was eight years old and asked my mother what the capital of Uruguay was. She didn’t know, but she took me to the library where I found out it was Montevideo. It was like a huge light went on in my head. That was it.

Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

Throughout my formal education, I spent many, many hours in public and school libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were. The current definitive answer to almost any question can be found within the four walls of most libraries

I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one’s one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

You asked me where I generally lived. In my workshop [i.e. in his study] in the mornings and always in the library in the evening. Books are companions even if you don’t open them.