Alan Bradley Quotes

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.

We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

I grew up in a bookish family, so I read very widely. I was omnivorous, really.

Children find prescriptive reading lists daunting, and they are a dangerous thing to have in schools.

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?'

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

I hadn't been a particularly precocious reader, but everybody else in my family was.

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 grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me.

I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read with your child.

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

We didn't have much, but I was raised to believe if you had books, you had a lot. My grandfather and my parents made me and my twin brother Kiel read at least a book a week.

I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.

When I was little, my older brother, Gary, was forced to read a book a week in fourth grade. The books he liked he threw on my bed when he was finished with them. This continued throughout my childhood and made me a reader for life.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

I have always had someone in my life that I consider my reading mentor because I come from a family where reading was not emphasized or even approved of.

My grandfather and mother were school teachers, so there was always some discussion around books.

My father was very fond of reading. It was something we did at our home. I don't think it fits the way people think Bollywood works, but that's who we are.

My mother wanted me to be a reader. She was a reader. Even though she had an 11th-grade education, she was curious about all kinds of things - archeology, anthropology.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

I sort of take cues from my grandparents.