Salman Rushdie Quotes

I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

I want kids to think that reading can be just as much fun and more so than TV or video games or whatever else they do. I think any other kind of message or morals that I might teach is secondary to first just enjoying a book.

When I was little, I thought everyone in the world liked to read because it was so fun. But then I realised that was not exactly true. I want other kids to read and write more all over the world, because it helps them to understand things better.

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

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.

I've tried to tell my kids: If you're reading something engrossing, you'll never, ever be bored.

It is important for children to learn, whether they want to pursue music or any other field.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.

I think if you can show a kid that reading can actually be fun, it can make you laugh, inspire imagination - that can make a huge difference, that can help a child who's struggling with reading to really look at it differently.

Having a sense of fun in books is a huge, huge deal, because a lot of times kids - even me when I got to third or fourth grade - don't associate reading with fun.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.

A children's book is the perfect place where young readers can understand the world because they can take a deep breath and look at it and imagine and contemplate while they're looking at.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

One of my passions is that children enjoy their time at school - and reading for pleasure can be an important part of that.

I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him.

The way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you get very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you. You want to know where it goes at night; who its friends are; what it eats.

But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.

Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

Lots of kids in books are only-child orphans, but I think it’s fun to have family as part of the adventure, to have familial love be as important as romantic love, and to show that love can go through fire and darkness - not unchanged, because experiences like that change everyone - but never faltering

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.