I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on I go to the library and read a good book.

If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.

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.

My parents and librarians along the way taught me about the space between words about the margins where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed in the friendliest way.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven printed scores of Beethoven that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes but the wrong dynamic understandable things.

A library to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

Until he lost all his money my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

A library implies an act of faith.