Diane Setterfield Quotes

I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever -- they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

When I was little I used to wish I could talk to the illustrators because I wanted to discuss something about the books. With so many of the other art forms that children experience, such as movies and television, they don't get to control the pace.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

I think I'm still fed by my childhood experience of reading, even though obviously I'm reading many books now and a lot of them are books for children but I feel like childhood reading is this magic window and there's something that you sort of carry for the rest of your life when a book has really changed you as a kid, or affected you, or even made you recognize something about yourself.

I believe the principles and techniques in this book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, can literally change the world, but more importantly, they can change the quality of your life with your spouse, your children, your neighbors, your co-workers and everyone else you interact with. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

I always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

But it doesn't stop at school. We can all enjoy books throughout our lives - as I certainly continue to do.

I don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.