Jesse Ball Quotes

So instead of watching TV, we read every night together as a family.

'Black Beauty,' by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7.

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

I love stories. I loved stories when I was a kid. My mom read stories to me all the time.

My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they've sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.

Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.

My mom bought me an 'Anne of Green Gables' journal. And I just remember thinking it was so cool, and I could write anything in it.

Everyone has a story that they read when they were younger that influenced them.

'True Grit' is one of the few books my sons let me read to them - and paid attention to - when they were younger.

I remember him reading 'Sleeping Beauty,' and he would play the score by Tchaikovsky as he read it. We'd also read 'Winnie the Pooh,' and, you know, those probably that he most often read me were 'Beatrix Potter' books, 'The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck' and 'The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.' I still have at least 15 of them.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

When I was a kid, the book that I liked the most was 'Aesop's Fables.' There was a version of it that my father read stories to us kids out of. I liked the idea of the short story format.

When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.

'The Secret Garden' was the first musical that I fell in love with when I was a kid. My mom took me to see it, and it was the first one that I owned the soundtrack to and listened to over and over again.

I've never told you the story of Alice in Wonderland, have I?

My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.

I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

I don't really remember my folks singing to us, but they read to us.

I don't remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he'd make them up.

My mom tells me the first show we saw was 'The Secret Garden,' but I don't remember that.

Christmas was always a big holiday in our family. Every Christmas Eve before we'd go to bed, my mom and dad would read to us two or three stories and they would always be 'The Happy Prince,' 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,' and I would like to keep that alive.

As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.