Judy Blume Quotes

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

I'm a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to 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.

A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think.

At times, parents foist their own choices on kids and try to get them to read the classics. But kids have very high filters and don't take to it. At other times, parents simply don't know what books to select for their children and end up giving books that aren't appropriate.

I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.

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

If a child wants to read 'Twilight' over Middlemarch, they should be encouraged - the important thing is to get them reading in the first place.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!

Experts say that if children can't read by the end of the fifth grade, they lose self-confidence and self-esteem, making them more likely to enter the juvenile justice system.

I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve, and realising that just because you can read book doesn't mean you should.

Childhood reading is so important.

Kids who are nine, 10 and 11 are pretty sophisticated readers; they know that there isn't always a good outcome every time and that problems don't always have solutions.

When I was 8, I was reading 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and all that, not knowing it wasn't my reading level.

I cannot remember not being able to read.

I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.

Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they’re four years old, they’re usually among the best readers by the time they’re eight.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.

I'm concerned, as I guess all middle-aged people are, about the younger generations' level of literacy.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.

There are some things that are more appropriate for different audiences. But the goal with all ages is to create comics that anyone can read, that don't talk down to kids. Kids can handle a lot more than people think.

Children who attend high-quality early care and education programs before kindergarten perform better on assessments of reading and math skills and socio-emotional development. However, since early care and education programs are so expensive, low-income families face significant barriers.