Stephen McCauley Quotes

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of 'The Wind in the Willows,' which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.

Kids think books are cool, especially when they see that people they think books are cool are reading.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.

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?'

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

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn't find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he'd have been pleased if I'd made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.

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

I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.

Women and men grow up with both sexes. Our mothers and fathers mean a lot to us, so it's just a question of finding a balance between their influences. I've found mine. And it tends to be more on the male side. I mean male side the way we understand it in the West.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.

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.

When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time.

In some families, parents don't read or don't have the money to spend on books.

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Man is what he reads.

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

I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.