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"Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000."
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"Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid."

"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Explore more quotes by Anthony Burgess

"Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?"

"Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded-."

"In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations."

"A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey."
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