I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven printed scores of Beethoven that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes but the wrong dynamic understandable things.

A library to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

Until he lost all his money my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

A library implies an act of faith.

The fear of failure is so great it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.

The institution of a public library containing books on education would be well adapted for the information of teachers many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.

If you want to get laid go to college. If you want an education go to the library.

Your library is your paradise.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Both my mum and dad were great readers and we would go every Saturday morning to the library and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature and all of us would come with an armful of books.

If truth is beauty how come no one has their hair done in the library?

That Moorish architecture is all over the place of course. It affects me everywhere I see it as it does so many people. But Brand Library was a special place to me and I know I've paid homage to it many times in my drawings.

As a child I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there I wanted to make loads of money.