“Libraries raised me.”

“You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.”

“I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”

“This is incredible. This is quite amazing because who you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers. And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for 10 years and I graduated from the library when I was 28.”

“Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.”

“Live in the library, for Christ’s sake! Don’t live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library!”

“... bums on the outside, libraries inside.”