James Patterson Quotes

If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.

If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is a valuable part of your daily routine.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. The best way for children to treasure reading is to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

Anything that encourages a boy to open a book, in a world of more violent and therefore more compelling video games, is something I'm going to pay for.

If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

I read to my children, and now they love to read. I encourage parents to carve out just 20 minutes a day. It helps you learn more about them, and really opens the door for you to speak into their life!

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.

It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.

Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.

Anything that gets children reading is fine.

This is what I believe is most important: getting good books into the hands of kids - books that will make them want to say, 'Wow, that was great. Give me another one to read.'

Be a good reading role model. Show kids what you like to read, what you don't like to read, how you choose what you read. Let them see you reading.

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.

I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.

You can't tell your kids to read if you're just watching television. They have to see you read. And in that respect, I think it's important to walk the walk. It's a wonderful shared time.

I think kids will read more good books than we can possibly produce.

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children.

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

Every generation likes to think that children don't read as much as they used to when they were young! You listen to some adults saying they were going around reading 'Ulysses' when they were seven or eight! I think children are voracious readers if you give them the right books and if you make those books accessible to them.

I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.

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

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.

School librarians play such an enormous role in bringing children to books they are going to enjoy. It's a magic alchemy when that works.