Nat Hentoff Quotes

For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.

My parents were teachers and they went out of their way to see to it that I had books. We grew up in a home that was full of books. And so I learned to read. I loved to read.

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.

Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.

I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

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.

Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.

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

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

I seemed to have been born reading.

I was read to as a small child, I read on my own as soon as I could, and I recall being more or less overwhelmed again and again - if not by what the books actually said, by what they suggested, what they helped me to imagine.

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.

Both of my parents had me reading at a really young age. Maybe it was a hereditary thing, but my mom always had my nose in a book. I've always been a bookworm.

I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library - the public library - twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.

When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.

I read prodigiously as a child, and I still do.

I was a reader as a child, believe it or not.

I am glad to say that I used to read a lot right from a young age.

My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me.

I was reading 'The Prophet' on my own when I was 10 years old.

I first read Heinlein when I was very young.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

I do think, where would kids be if it weren't for you and for the good pediatricians, and for the good parents? I passionately believe in sitting a child on your lap and tracing the lines of the book with your finger, and they can read before they know they can, if you bother enough. I did it with my kids, and they're doing it with their kids now.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.