“Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him ifgiven the chance to do it all over againhed start taking heroin, he doesnt pause. Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in thereyou mee...”

“David Cameron is a C-3P0 made of ham.”

“Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn't keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.”

“The shelves were supposed to be loaded with booksbut they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out ...”

“I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the ce...”

“A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.”

“my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.”

“Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.”

“If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ”

“It was four o'clock of a stickily wet Saturday. As long as it is anything from Monday to Friday the average library attendant goes around thanking her stars she isn't a school-teacher; but the last...”

“The world is quiet here.”

“I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library.”