Quotes from Ian Sansom

L]ibrarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with mental health disorders, can make people nervous.

Children are bad enough--children are rude, selfish, greedy, and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol, and power.

Those who can, do; those who can't learn classification and cataloguing.

Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not.

They were always there for you, books, like a small pet dog that doesn't die.

Everyone loved a good reader. And he'd always loved being a great reader - until recently. Maybe it was just part of getting older, or maybe it was being a librarian, or just being here, but lately he'd found he was becoming suspicious of his own love of books. All that reading - it had started to seem wrong, worthless almost, without purpose.

I think it's about time that women spoke out about their real lives, rather than pretending all the time to be second-rate men

the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing

Good luck is a skill, and bad luck simply the product of poor choices and overlooked opportunities. In other words, tough luck.

Bird's Custard Powder.

The key to all human interaction, Morley often advised me, is simply to ask others about themselves. Nothing else matters- and everything then follows.