Jean Fritz Quotes

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.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

The first time I remember really being excited about a book was 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'

When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter,' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

When I was really little, my favorite book was 'The BFG'. I read it - my teacher in, like, first grade read it to us. I love that book.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.

My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.

I first read 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' when I was a kid. And I think it was read to me. Me and my sister both had a copy and loved the books.

When I was young, I loved a series of books by an author called Maud Hart Lovelace and the series, which is still around, I'm happy to say, is - they're the 'Betsy-Tacy' books.

I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift - never the Hardy Boys - but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan's war books. As to favorite character: I'm torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

As I kid, I read the 'Little House on the Prairie' series and was sad when I got to the last book.

As far as fiction goes, as far as everything from Dr. Seuss to Oscar Wilde to Bret Easton Ellis. Ray Bradbury. There's just tons of stuff that I love. Neil Gaiman!

I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.

I studied in Kerala, so learnt to read and write Malayalam.

In 2011, I didn't read a single book.

Certainly in the case of 'Gnomeo & Juliet,' if it makes children or adults a little more interested in Shakespeare, there's nothing wrong with that!

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

If you aren't a reader and you have a kid with his face buried in books, it can be a bit threatening. My parents viewed my reading as somewhat effeminate, but also subversive on some level.

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.