When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it.

Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.

I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.

I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian's quiet smile as I'd bring back one stack and exchange it for another.

It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

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.

Boston had the first public library, Liverpool had the first lending library. Both cities have pioneered medical advancements during the decades and both have the largest economic powers in the world exactly 213 miles to the south by car.

I mean, for all of his faults and the troubles in his marriage, Bill Clinton is still married to a girl he met in the library 25 years ago at school. Can we say that about many of our other leaders today in America, including on the right wing?

Yes, there's such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o'clock in the morning. You'll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o'clock in the morning.

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.

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day. 'Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here's Matt researching in aisle six of his local library'. A few hours of that and they'd go home.

Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don't think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there's always a library.

I believe that when an elder dies, a library is burned: vast sums of wisdom and knowledge are lost. Throughout the world libraries are ablaze with scant attention.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.

When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.