Darryl Pinckney Quotes

We had a few non-fiction books at home, but my dad was of the opinion that fiction was a complete and utter waste of time because it wasn't real - so what was the point of reading it?

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun.

I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.

I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.

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 can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.

I read a lot as a kid and in high school.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.

I just finished my homework fast, I was bored to death. There wasn't 500 channels so there was a thing for a librarian to teach a kid like me about reading. I started reading early and I read all the time, because I love it.

I grew up in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and reading was a big part of my life - I'd get through several books a week.

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

I wasn't really much of a reader early on, but when I first started getting into reading at around 16 all I could really read was Kurt Vonnegut books.

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.

Growing up, as a kid, I loved to read. I liked to read books that were above my range. I always tried to aim higher and read difficult books.

I don't really read a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and thought I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen King books but with some of them I just put them down as well. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or music.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I first read 'Tom Sawyer' when I was in 8th grade, 13 years old. I realised since that Mark Twain just bottled what it felt like to be a child.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

My library is segregated into philosophy, history, general reading, travel, my own books... and only three cookbooks.

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.

I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid - I read everything I could get my hands on.