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I grew up in a small town in Washington state
and there just wasn't much culture there at alA
And if I wanted culture ouside of my house, it [the library]
was really the only place to go.
And I would very often go.
In the two small towns I'm from Multas? Lake and Aberdeen...
Even when I became a young adult,
I would be visiting my parents
from my job on the East Coast,
I would got o the library almost every day
in these towns, because that's the only place
where I could find interesting stuff to think about.
Well, I live in Seattle, the Seattle system is just terrific.
You can get virtually any book and it will be sent in a couple of days,
to my local branch, which is Montlake, or I can download books...e-books, which I do.
It saves me alot of money and...
the book I just read from my library is about Lawrence of Arabia.
It's actually a biography called "Hero,"
and it is just a fantastic adventure.
[On library budget cuts] I'm against them, and I vote for library levies
when they come around, but so do the people of Seattle; they support the libraries pretty well...
As I say, it's a fantastic system.
[On censorship]Well, I'm against that.
I'm the author of a book about the country of North Korea ...that bans all books,
basically, except for those that they find are good for the regime.
People there have been sheltered, curtained off from the rest of the world for
over half a century
and a good library is
something that would,
in many ways, destroy that regime.
There are a lot of incendiary ideas you can find in libraries.
I'm using libraries for... I'm doing another book about North Korea,
and I'm doing a lot of library research, which is part of it.
I use the University of Washington Library and the Seattle Public Library
to get some of the stuff that I need.