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As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.

I spent more time at the library than anyone my age when I was a kid.

As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things.

My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.

I discovered reading through libraries. I grew up in a house that wasn't brimming with books.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

If there's a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worked in the library. It's such a force for social good and it can do so much.