Anthony Burgess Quotes

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house--on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she'd use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.

I was in a convenience store, reading a magazine. The clerk told me, "this is not a library!" "OK! I will talk louder, then!"

New York's such a wonderful city. Although I was at the library today. The guy was very rude. I said, "I'd like a card." He says, "You have to prove you're a citizen of New York." So I stabbed him.

The public library is the great equaliser.

Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.

I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.

I spent the first few years of my life in a smallish community in Queens. Back in those early days, kids could roam the streets with relatively little supervision and one place I visited frequently was the local library. This particular branch was little more than a storefront but to me it was an alternative universe where I could explore my interests and receive kind, informative answers to my questions from the wonderful librarians.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.

I am a public library

I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .

More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are in a different moment. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

The library should be a commonplace to every one. To use it should be as natural when one needs news or knowledge, fiction or fact, as it is to use the trolley when one needs transportation.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.

It may be primarily property taxes in the case of a public library, or state taxes and tuition in the case of an academic library at a public university, but the funding sources of most libraries continue to have a strong geographic component.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

I just thought you'd like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin' I can do it.