Matthew Lesko Quotes

As a big user of public libraries, I deplore the cutbacks they have had to sustain.

Random House is definitely invested in keeping libraries healthy.

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

I've been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now.

Support your libraries... or else!

I have encountered those who feel that libraries have served their purpose and are no longer needed. There are those who consider them a soft target when it comes to local authority budget cuts. In certain political quarters, there is a refusal to see that our public library service needs active protection.

I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tendency to borrow instead of buy.

Andrew Carnegie loved libraries; he knew their importance to an educated society and as anchors to our communities. And so, just as some loyal baseball fans travel to attend games at all 30 major league stadiums, over the last decade or so, I have slowly, casually, visited Carnegie libraries whenever I am on the road.

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.

Library campaigners are not prepared to stand by and watch something they cherish be dismantled brick by brick.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has liberally provided a way in which every town may have a collection of books free to all. So successfully has the enactment been carried out that only three per cent of the State’s population is unprovided with a free public library, and this remnant will soon be favored with its public stock of standard books.

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

The librarian must be the librarian militant before he can be the librarian triumphant.

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.

President Johnson wanted no admission fee charged at the library. I have been sorely tempted to change that policy often, but I fear the reaction from the grave would be overwhelming.

In reality, handing over public space to private developers does not guarantee that new library spaces will be comparable in size or otherwise remain fully-functional.

It's still National Library Week. You should be especially nice to a librarian today, or tomorrow. Sometime this week, anyway. Probably the librarians would like tea. Or chocolates. Or a reliable source of funding.

I take every opportunity I can to speak to librarians.

What is also strange to me is that public libraries have always been in the forefront of opposing censorship.

If the library's rarest frequenters are the ones we'd like to see in them the most, then libraries are failing.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.

I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.

More people should use their library.

I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.