Teresa Nielsen Hayden Quotes

Reading serves as a good escape when you're in the middle of doing crazy things.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

Students read for tests and because their parents ask them to, but I think it's very important to tell children that you can read for fun, too, and to understand human spirit. It builds empathy.

Your library is your portrait.

Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.

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

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

When I was a kid, I loved having a book in my hand. I still do. I wasn't a fast reader, but I was a steady reader. I read all of The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Cherry Ames books.

You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.

One of the great joys in life is reading, yet it's the main thing people say they don't have time to do.

My love of books - not just of their tactile pleasures but of their astonishing variety - was born in a book-filled house; my father is a scholar.

I would read all day if I could.

Outside of the mindless sitcoms that the networks thrive on, people able to think generally consider most entertainment is escape in one form or another.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

I hate the idea of any kid missing out on the magic of reading.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I didn't read a novel all the way through until after high school. Blasphemy, I know. I'm an author now. Books and words are my world.

I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if I'd grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

My attention is constantly being caught! I'm constantly learning, constantly becoming fascinated by new things - I'm lucky that I read incredibly quickly and absorb a lot of information easily, because otherwise I don't think I'd ever get my head out of a book!

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

It is hazardous to discourage thought, hope or imagination …

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.