Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.

I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.

Whatever I'm reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I'm writing.

Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.

I loved to read, and I think any child who loves to read will read anything, including the back of the cereal box, which I did every morning.

I have never met an author who did not read voraciously as a child.

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.

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.

One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.

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.

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.

Childhood reading is so important.

Writers don't write writing, they write reading. When I was a kid, I read four or five books a week. And that is how I became a writer.

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.

I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

I'm going to imprint myself on everything in this world.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.

I want to leave a mark on society.

I read so many books when I was a kid that I didn't even know were shaping me up.

I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. 'The Prince and the Pauper' was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt's copy of 'In Cold Blood' and she didn't ask for it back.

I don't know if there's anything Kanye West can do that can erase his influence on me, because it's here. It's already there. He can't even reverse that himself, because it's just so ingrained in me.

I can't imagine turning into one of those codgers who no longer reads fiction. I'm regularly stirred by it and suffer no anxiety of influence. Influence me! That was my credo then, as I was developing and learning, and remains so now, as I'm developing and learning.

I grew up reading - and loving - stories by Andre Norton. I admired and idolised her from afar. Her stories helped shape my own internal world.