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.
I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.
People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.
If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
I don't really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.
The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people's private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.
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 was lucky enough to have parents with a huge film library. My mum is a huge Bollywood film geek. When we were kids, we would watch Indian films with her as well as Chinese and Japanese films. My father was more into the classics, American films, and also Hitchcock films.
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.
But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
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.
I wanted to sail when I was in grammar school and well remember memorizing the names of the sails from the Merriam-Webster's ponderous dictionary in the library. Now I am actually at sea - as a passenger, of course, but at sea nevertheless - and bound for Ecuador.
Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.
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.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of Midnight' by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.
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.
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.
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.
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.
In elementary school, I read every single space book in the library about all the planets, about nebulas, about black holes. So for as long as I can remember, I've been just looking up at the stars and wondering what's out there and even what may be looking back at us.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.
A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.
I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.
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.
We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all things to do with the future and space. Isaac Asimov soon became my guiding star.
As voters and taxpayers, we must demand that our local governments properly prioritize libraries. As citizens, we must invest in our library down the street so that the generations served by that library grow up to be adults who contribute not just to their local communities but to the world.
The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.
