Jack McDevitt Quotes

I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.

I hope to instill, in every child I meet, my love and enthusiasm for reading and stories.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

I think that children who read are better writers, and children who tell stories appreciate books.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

You can't write if you don't read.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good.

I was a very avid reader when I was a child, and I also was a good listener.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.

I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.