Nate Powell Quotes

I would make up [Theodor] Seuss-like books at night when I was cleaning up from the dinner, you know, putting these little kids to bed, reading them rhyming books. And so that's what I started doing. They were really bad. I have some in a box and it says on the box, it's a note to my kids you know, when I die, if you ever publish these I will come back and haunt you.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.

We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.

What would make me happiest is if kids read these books [Bink & Gollie] and think: there is so much to love in the world; and words are so much fun.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

I always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.

Many adults feel that every children's book has to teach them something.... My theory is a children's book... can be just for fun.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

I'm a big comic book geek and I've been reading comic books since pretty much since I was five or six in 1971 or something like that. So, I mean, I read it all and there's certainly a lot of different iterations of Superman that I personally have enjoyed more than others.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Teachers and librarians are some of my favorite people, especially since I was a teacher myself. I love talking to them because they have wonderful ideas about how to share books, and especially about how to share my books with kids.

I think parents should know what their children are reading, and if they truly object, they should tell their kids why, rather than summarily removing a book from their possession.

It's funny what [producer Richard Zanuck said about even though you can't quite place when the book or the story came into your life, and I do vaguely remember roughly five years old reading versions of Alice in Wonderland, but the thing is the characters. You always know the characters. Everyone knows the characters and they're very well-defined characters, which I always thought was fascinating. Most people who haven't read the book definitely know the characters and reference them.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.

As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.

I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life.

The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.

Insults from an adolescent daughter are more painful, because they are seen as coming not from a child who lashes out impulsively,who has moments of intense anger and of negative feelings which are not integrated into that large body of responses, impressions and emotions we call 'our feelings for someone,' but instead they are coming from someone who is seen to know what she does.

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.