Rabih Alameddine Quotes

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

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

If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is a valuable part of your daily routine.

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.

My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.

People say, 'All my son will read is 'Captain Underpants,' or 'My son is crazy about shark books, is that O.K.?' I want to be the person to say, 'Yeah, that's really O.K., as long as he's motivated to want to read.'

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

Let's face it: Most of us don't realize it, but we are failing our kids as reading role models. The best role models are in the home: brothers, fathers, grandfathers; mothers, sisters, grandmothers. Moms and dads, it's important that your kids see you reading. Not just books - reading the newspaper is good, too.

I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.

I was very fortunate to grow up with parents who love to travel, so I traveled from a young age. My dad's a heart surgeon and goes to conferences all over the world. By the time I was seven, I traveled outside the country for the first time. We went to Paris. The next year, we went to London, and then Brussels.

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.

I'd always been a big reader. I credit my mom for giving me my love of reading.

My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

I think there is a lot to be said for the respect that our parents had for children, and for my brothers and sisters and me at a very young age, and for exposing them to the world and what's out there.

My parents were keen for me to have the education they themselves never had. They weren't able to guide me towards particular books, but they encouraged me to read, which I did, randomly and compulsively.

Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

I always knew the importance of it, since I was three or four years old my mother used to feed me wine and water. I grew up with wine as liquid food.

When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

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.