Tom Rachman Quotes

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

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 have always had someone in my life that I consider my reading mentor because I come from a family where reading was not emphasized or even approved of.

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

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

My dad dropped out of school in middle school, but he reads five or six books a week, and my mom reads about two.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

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 an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

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

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.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.

We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read with your child.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read.

I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.

When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time.

I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.