Quotes & Sayings About Child Reading

Another case for the dumbness of reading, however, is that books do not contain answers, but rather pose more questions. And asking questions makes you look dumber, not smarter.
I thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would be a delightful romp through a child's subconscious, but while reading it I started to ask questions like "How do you really speak to other humans when our language often means the opposite of what is intended?" and "How do I really know anyone?" And so on, until I was asking the question "Why even exist at all?"
That didn't make me smarter! That made me wish for death, and being dead looks way dumber than being alive. — Dan Wilbur

Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to. — Jim Trelease

Consider a small child sitting on his mother's lap while she reads him a picture book. The picture book opens to a width that effectively places the child at the center of a closed circle - that of mother's body, arms, and the picture book ... That circle, so private and intimate, is a place apart form the demands and stresses of daily life, a sanctuary in and from which the child can explore the many worlds offered in picture books. Despite all of our society's technological advances, it still just takes one child, one book, and one reader, to create this unique space, to work this everyday magic. — Martha V. Parravano

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books. — Hermann Hesse

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. — Alberto Manguel

Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories. — Pam Allyn

If the White House could do more to tell parents that getting children reading is their business too, we'd see a big difference. Hollywood and the NBA or NFL could step in, too. In England they have an event called Book Day, where every child receives a pound to use at any bookstore. — James Patterson

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before. — Agatha Christie

Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one. — Jim Trelease

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life. — Dolly Parton

I am reading a terrible sententious book called The Wedding of Herbert Mimnaugh. Firstly, what sort of a name is Herbert and why would a parent with any trace of natural affection wish to afflict their child with such a name? Herbert's parents do not feature prominently in the book when this choice alone makes it obvious that they are the most interesting people in it. — Zen Cho

I had been reading children's books all my life and saw them not as minor amusements but as part of the whole literary mainstream; not as "juveniles" or "kiddie lit," one of the most demeaning terms in the scholastic jargon.
My belief was, and is, that the child's book is a unique and valid art form; a means of dealing with things which cannot be dealt with quite as well in any other way. There is, I'm convinced, no inner, qualitative difference between writing for adults and writing for children. The raw materials are the same for both: the human condition and our response to it. — Lloyd Alexander

If a child wants to read 'Twilight' over Middlemarch, they should be encouraged - the important thing is to get them reading in the first place. — Malorie Blackman

Child, unless you are opening a dictionary, you start at the book's opening page and you read the story through. If it's terribly dreadful, then just put it down and move on. What I will not tolerate is reading ahead. It's not fair to the reader or to the author. If they meant to have their books read backwards, they would surely have written them that way! — Camron Wright

No player in the NBA was born wanting to play basketball. The desire to play ball or to read must be planted. The last 25 years of research show that reading aloud to a child is the oldest, cheapest and must successful method of instilling that desire. Shooting baskets with a child creates a basketball player; reading to a child creates a reader. — Jim Trelease

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading. Stop them reading what they enjoy or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like - the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian 'improving' literature - you'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and, worse, unpleasant. — Neil Gaiman

I had TB as a child. So I was put to doing things like drawing and reading. And I was raised in a family where manners were important. Maybe that's why I seem so refined. — Katherine Helmond

The more you do it, the more you learn to concentrate, as a child does, incredibly intensively and then you sort of have to relax. I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would in between scenes be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I'd think, 'How can you do that?' — Cate Blanchett

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology. — William Ball

No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child — Robert D. Harris

I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading. — Gerald Murnane

There is still in many schools complete misapprehension that children with reading difficulties are stupid. It is so easy to teach a child that they're dumb. There needs to be a recognition that you need different ways to teach children who have got reading problems. — Jackie French

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener. — Paula Fox

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. — Maya Angelou

When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists. — Marilynne Robinson

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other. — Mary Oliver

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.
[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech] — Lois Lowry

Julia could form no opinion of Robert, the bespectacled middle child, for he passed the entire journey with his nose stuck in a book, returning only monosyllabic answers to any questions put to him — Sheri Cobb South

As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there's no rigour to it. — Jonathan Stroud

You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child. — Dr. Seuss

Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books-they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past. — Esther Meynell

Parents can do three things to make reading active. (1) Elaborate and explain the text to the child. This extends and deepens the experience of the story. (2) Relate the story to the child's own experiences. An interest in reading and understanding the meaning of the text occur if there is 'further information' to personalize the text. (3) Ask questions to ensure the child understands the story, thinks about the characters and plot, and extends their imagination. — Colin Baker

There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book. — Frank Serafini

By degrees they spoke of education , and the book-learning that forms one part of it; and the result was that Ruth determined to get up early all throughout the bright summer mornings, to acquire the knowledge hereafter to be give to her child. Her mind was uncultivated, her reading scant; beyond the mere mechanical arts of education she knew nothing; but she had a refined taste, and excellent sense and judgment to separate the true from the false. — Elizabeth Gaskell

I spent a lot of time reading blogs by mothers who had children with varying degrees of neural dysfunction, from schizophrenia to all sorts of different issues. And honestly, I don't think it's different for anybody. There's no right way to make sure your child will be emotionally and mentally healthier. It's just frustrating. — Vera Farmiga

Awareness of having better things to do with their lives is the secret to immunizing our children against false values
whether presented on television or in "real life." The child who finds fulfillment in music or reading or cooking or swimming or writing or drawing is not as easily convinced that he needs recognition or power or some "high" to feel worthwhile. — Polly Berrien Berends

Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be careful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text. — Margaret Kennedy

Once upon a time, when I was a child reading fairy tales, I'd ached to have my own adventures. Not that I'd wanted to be some dippy heroine languishing in a tower, awaiting rescue. No, I'd wanted to be the knight, charging into battle against overwhelming odds, or the plucky country lass who gets taken on as an apprentice to a great wizard. As I got older, I'd found out the hard way that adventures are rarely anything like the books say. Half the time you are scared out of your mind, and the rest you're bored and your feet hurt. I was beginning to believe that maybe I wasn't the adventurous type. — Karen Chance

When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important - that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them. — Laura Bush

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book
if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading. — Philip Roth

I was a very difficult child, and the time I spent reading was about the only peace I gave my mother. — Kate Beckinsale

Reading to small children is a specialty. — Clifton Fadiman

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE
GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading. — Anne Fadiman

If you're reading this book, you're probably already interested in being green, and almost certainly already a parent (or about to become one), so I won't trouble too much with the semantics of what 'being green' means, but just say that doing the 'green' thing here means being as environmentally friendly as possible, while considering your child's everyday personal health as well, and taking into account social-justice issues to some degree, because no-one is an island and humans and animals are part of the environment too. Even if you're new to this, it's entirely
possible, with a little helping hand, to form new, green lifestyle habits, so long as you're prepared to take baby steps to begin with (and pardon the pun). — Zion Lights

Focusing on the way I look makes me uncomfortable. I try to focus on the way I feel - I know what makes me feel better about myself. Reading my child a story makes me feel great, doing my hair nicely doesn't. — Elle Macpherson

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate. — Mem Fox

We are all children that need nurturing, love and care. So give your inner child that nurturing and love, give yourself back the joy of preparing healthy and nutritious meals, joy of experiencing food without TV, reading, working, rush. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading. — Sandra Day O'Connor

I just ... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of ... rather an introverted child, probably. — Helen Garner

When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening ... I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books. — Kathleen Norris

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child. — Robin McKinley

I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home. — J.M. Coetzee

Imagine what it must be like for teenagers who don't feel they have room to breathe in their own homes. If you are a parent reading this book, you care about your child. If she is quirky, unusual, or nonconformist, ask yourself whether you are doing everything you can to nurture her unusual interests, style, or skills, or whether instead you are directly or subtly pushing her to hide them. — Alexandra Robbins

On the other couch a women sits with a young boy looking through a picture book about Babar the Elephant. When I find a magazine and I lean back to start reading it, I can see the women watching me out of the corner of her eye. She moves closer to the child and she leans over and kisses his forehead. I know why she does it and i don't blame her. — James Frey

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York. — Chris Raschka

The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child's play. Imaginative literature
the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes
is an important part of the Christian's literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives. — Tony Reinke

Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: 'A book never does any harm if it is well written.' While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: 'But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?' 'I shall live them!' This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When a child speaks of a past life memory, the effects ripple far. At the center is the child, who is directly healed and changed. The parents standing close by are rocked by the truth of the experience - a truth powerful enough to dislodge deeply entrenched beliefs. For observers removed from the actual event - even those just reading about it - reports of a child's past life memory can jostle the soul toward new understanding. Children's past life memories have the power to change lives. — Carol Bowman

My parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child. — Ray Bradbury

As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the ... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading. — Marie Clay

A book is not just paper and ink, it's a world full of dreams, imaginations, knowledge, awakening, emboldening and a lot, lot more invaluable treasures. Gift your child a book - introduce them to the joy of reading. — Jyoti Arora

If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading. — Susan Cooper

To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand. — Zoltan Kodaly

I have very positive memories of reading biographies of unusual Americans as a child. — Chris Van Allsburg

You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. 'Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M'Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and-'
'Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M'Turk. 'He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says we're "children of noble races, trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck! — Rudyard Kipling

Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers. — Sue Monk Kidd

In 1975, stay-at-home mothers spent an average of about eleven hours per week on primary child care (defined as routine caregiving and activities that foster a child's well-being, such as reading and fully focused play). Mothers employed outside the home in 1975 spent six hours doing these activities. Today, stay-at-home mothers spend about seventeen hours per week on primary child care, on average, while mothers who work outside the home spend about eleven hours. This means that an employed mother today spends about the same amount of time on primary child care activities as a nonemployed mother did in 1975. — Sheryl Sandberg

Why a child needs a picture book?
Experts explain why the illustration is so important in the narrative and give tips on how to choose a picture book for your children.

By turning an idea into something reality, illustrated book further fuels the child's fantasy. Recent research on teaching concluded that the best performing students are not the ones who read the classics. The important thing is to allow children access to a variety of reading styles and the pleasure of choosing what they want to read. — Jessie Zane Carter

But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep. — Ramona Koval

I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well. — Shigeru Miyamoto

My writing works best when I remember that bookish child who adored reading and gear the work toward him. — Bruce Coville

Nothing ensures the success of the child more in the society than being read to from infancy to young adulthood. Reading books to and with children is the single most important thing a parent, grandparent, or significant adult can do. — Anita Silvey

What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.' — Martin Chalfie

You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way. — Meg Medina

As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character. — Richard Whately

I hope to instill, in every child I meet, my love and enthusiasm for reading and stories. — Malorie Blackman

It feels as though there is a gaping hole in the middle of everything. The decades of my mother's life here with Thalia, they are dark, vast spaces to me. I have been absent. Absent for all the meals Thalia and Mama have shared at this table, the laughs, the quarrels, the stretches of boredom, the illnesses, the long string of simple rituals that make up a lifetime. Entering my child-hood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I'd started, then abandoned, long ago. — Khaled Hosseini

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed ... and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own. — Anna Quindlen

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?"
"The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret — Betty Smith

I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said,

'Mommy, I think we hurt the book! — Gina Sheridan

Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo. — Paul Goodman

Consider what a child misses during the 15, 000 hours (from birth to age seventeen) he spends in front of the TV screen. He is not working in the garage with his father, or in the garden with his mother. He is not doing homework, or reading, or collecting stamps. He is not cleaning his room, washing the supper dishes, or cutting the lawn. He is not listening to a discussion about community politics among his parents and their friends. He is not playing baseball or going fishing, or painting pictures. Exactly what does television offer that is so valuable it can replace these activities that transform an impulsive, self-absorbed child into a critically thinking adult? — Paul Copperman

Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations. — A. N. Wilson

Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar. — Philip Roth

When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she'd give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species. — J. Courtney Sullivan

A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. — Jonathan Franzen

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. — Virginia Woolf

By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world. — Mark Twain

I am positive I was not a neglected child. I remember reading 'The Jungle Book' and 'The Sleeping Beauty.' — Keri Russell

I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades. — Paul Watson

No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy. — Los Angeles Times

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. — John Updike

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. — Diane Setterfield

Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read. — Lemony Snicket

It is my desire to break the destructive generational cycle of illiteracy in the home by focusing on the children. Reading to your child has so much value as a parent because it opens the lines of communication. — Victoria Osteen

I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience. — Lois Lowry

I loved working with Malcolm [McDowell]. He's been such an important person in my life. I mean, not just as someone I was married to, which is huge, and the father of my children, which is even bigger, but also as a friend and an inspiration and somebody who probably helped to fuel something that all my reading as a child had already started, which was a love of England and the world of the theater over there, which I became involved with through him and probably because of him. — Mary Steenburgen

It's such a wonderful feeling to watch a child discover that reading is a marvelous adventure rather than a chore. I know that many writers for children say they do not write specifically with a child audience in mind ... This isn't true for me. I am very aware of my audience. Sometimes I can almost see them out there reacting as I write. Sometimes I think, 'Oh, you're going to like this part. — Zilpha Keatley Snyder