At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

During the day, the library is a realm of order.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.