Mariella Frostrup Quotes

Less money for public media means less access to the arts.

I have a passion for libraries. They are potentially real community centers.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.

What I would like to do is make sure every primary school child has a library card, so where parents don't get their children library cards, we'll see if we can get schools to step in and make sure that every child has one.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.

I was very happy and honored to create the Professor Garfield Foundation with Ball State to make reading fun.

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me 'the book lady.' The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the 'book lady' title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I've done something good with my life and with my success.

Even though education was key in my family, I had no access to museums or art where we lived. I was a bit starved.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.

I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter,' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.

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

What I care about is readers because without readers I can't make a living... And I think it's a bad thing for the world if people don't read anymore. I want people to read a lot.

I love the fact that 'Flowers for Algernon' is doing its part to get people reading.

The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

I don't think the problem is that people don't read enough mystery books, but that people don't read.

My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.

I am a big advocate of the role of the bookstore in the community.

For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.