Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.

Libraries are our friends.

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world — a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . . .

Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.

And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.

There are plenty of people who, you know — people who still like the smell of books.

Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I'm always impressed by their sheer awesomeness.

Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark ... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."

[<i>Still in Melbourne January 1987</i>]

As a boy I was saved from a life of ignorance by my little hometown library.
As a college student I was educated in the
stacks of the Swarthmore library. And as an adult I use libraries daily in my search for the facts and the enlightenment I use in writing my books.
In fact, I like libraries so much that I
married a librarian.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.