John le Carre Quotes

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I'd always been a big reader. I credit my mom for giving me my love of reading.

I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.

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.

I was a reader as a child, believe it or not.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

In some families, parents don't read or don't have the money to spend on books.

I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

I read a lot of comics growing up. My mom used to say, 'Would you please read a book?' She was worried where I was going in my life.

By the time I was 12, I was reading my parents' books because there weren't teenage books then.

I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library - the public library - twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.

My mother was a big reader, and my father was an editorial writer for a newspaper.

In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren't educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a 'Reader's Digest' condensed book. Can you imagine?

I was a good boy in high school, and I read for English class, and I vaguely remember reading, as a kid, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stuff, but I didn't really read for pleasure.

I remember I had a copy of 'David Copperfield' that I lugged around at primary school. I started reading it when I was seven, and I was eight when I finished it. I read an awful lot as a little girl and played games and imagined lots of things.

What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.

Reading should be a repeat performance.

I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.

These are books that want to be read out loud. These are books kids share with each other, and I think that's important.

Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval.

I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.