Malorie Blackman Quotes

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination.

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books.

We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.

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?'

Every night, I was read to. Every Friday, we were taken to the library. I always received at least one book for my birthday. I have a few of them yet. Early on, I had my own collection of books. I loved to read. Still do.

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 seemed to have been born reading.

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

Now, my mom did not read well and she read 'True Romance' magazines, but she read with me. And she would spend 30 minutes a day, her finger going along the page, and I learned to read. Eventually, by the time I was four and a half, she could iron and I could sit there and read the 'True Romance.' And that was wonderful.

I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader - I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.

Childhood reading is so important.

I did start reading quite young but I was always read to by my parents, who are both actors. Bedtime stories from when I was about two/three to when I was about 15. In fact they didn't stop until I eventually kind of kicked them out of my bedroom.

Both of my parents had me reading at a really young age. Maybe it was a hereditary thing, but my mom always had my nose in a book. I've always been a bookworm.

I grew up as an avid reader. I would go to the library and check out 40 books a week. Some of them were smarty books; most of them were 'Sweet Valley High' and young teen romance.

My parents are both intellectuals and readers; my mother would take me to the library every few days from before I was one year old.

I'd earned over a million dollars by the time I was old enough to vote.

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.

People don't understand this, but I started very young, and I became very, very successful at a very young age. By the time I was 26 years old, I was a multimillionaire. And I started with nothing. And I was on the road 10, 11 months a year.

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

I started my own martial arts school at 16. And by the time I was 21, I had three different schools.

It's kind of sad, the way we've turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli - something to feel guilty about if you don't force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself.

I know that by the time I was in middle school, Andre Norton was definitely my favorite author.

The public library my parents took me to in Fort Worth had the children's section next to the SF/F section, so I was reading adult SF/F at a very young age.

I'm an athlete and I'm black, and a lot of black athletes go broke. I do not want to become a statistic, so maybe I overcompensate. But I'm paranoid. Oprah told me a long time ago, 'You sign every check. Never let anyone sign any checks.'

Frugality, when all is spent, comes too late.