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[On memories of librries] The library branch in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I grew up.
I remember being left alone
in library
by my parents, usually my mother, who would go off to the adult section and leave me in the kids section.
And I can remember
staggering from shelf shelf
and pulling stuff down.
She would find me at the end of the two or three hour period just buried in books,
having read 20 or 30 in a row,
obviously children's books,
not Dostoevsky or anything.
But I just remember being lost back in the stacks and loving the feeling of being lost.
I also remember the bookmobile.
We had bookmobiles in Montgomery County
I remember the feeling of stepping on that truck
and having it be full of books, and thinking
it made perfect sense for the
books to be on a truck somewhere and for the truck to come to my neighborhood.
[Favorite librarian?] I do.
I have to say that my favorite librarian is Madeline Lippman. I have to say that because
she's my mother in law,
but actually,
if I think about it,
I would say that
the woman who was the librarian on the bookmobile who would
often
hand me the book that she thought I was ready for. And I don't know her name,
I wish I could find out her name.
But of course I was five
or six years old.
She was the one who decided I was ready for "Curious George."She was the one who decided I was ready for
"A Wrinkle in Time." She was a big part of my life all the way through about fifth grade.
[On budget cuts] Well I guess I
was being a little bit flippant about the fact that we continually buy every book that isn't nailed down
in my household, but that's an indulgence
that...
I work in television now, so apparently I have somediscretionary income,
but a lot of people don't.
And access to
a library card is access to the world.
It's access to the world regardless of who you are,
how much money you have, what your
financial situation is, what your family's financial situation is.
It is the great
equalizer. The great
empowering element
in our society is the ability to
consume ideas at any pace,
and in any way you want to.
And I think that, you know, for anyone
who wants to know more today than they knew yesterday, wants to know more tomorrow,
the library card is the great
equalizer, it's the great instrument.
[On attempts to ban books]
I have no use for them.
I just don't know what to say about the amount of
resistence
to the world ideas.
Ideas stand on their own or they fall on the merits of the ideas themselves, not on the basis
of some artificial theology,
or some...
I have very little use for moralism.
I think that moralism without being able to stand up to intellectual rigoe is a false morality.
I look at books taht are even as elemental to the America experience as
"Huck Finn"
being edited, reedited,
to take out
the ugliness
in American history.
That book
matters because of the ugliness that's in its pages
because of what Twain has documented.
And Jim's journey
to humanity,
to full rigor of humanity,
is important because of how he's regarded his time and place. You take that
out of it
and
Jim's journey and the journey down the river mean less.
That people would be arguing over this in a new century is embarrassing.