[Zitat] Unkommentiert – 2011

Almost everything I am I owe to librariesWhen I was a child there was no great libraries around, certainly nothing like this [gestures to the shelves of the Bodleian Library in background] but we did have this thing called the mobile library van that would come once a fortnight I think and I would wait for it like a child waiting for an ice cream van and I would get on and I would get my supply of books and they would last me two weeks and then when I was older I could get to Norwich, the local big city.  I would spend hours and hours and hours there.  It’s like the will o’ the wisp: one book lights another book which lights another one and another one.  I suppose libraries still for me have this extraordinary charge.  When I get  in one I feel this buzz.  It’s almost sexual .  There is something about the fact that behind all these bound copies there are voices, there are people murmuring, seducing you, dragging you into their world.  These are wonderful magical places and I suppose that if I have a campaign that I am really behind it is that of saving our libraries.  Because everyone surely has the right to access the voices of the past.”

Stephen Fry