thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding, Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.
I'm always writing - its what I like to do. But when I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me.
A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.
I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
I was a kid who lived to read. It was the primary pleasure of my existence. It's still one of the primary pleasures of my existence. It's where I draw my sustenance.
The prime function of the children's book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years. Roald Dahl
As a kid, I spent every summer bent over a stack of books, obsessively writing detailed reports on each one.
For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.
Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.
I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.
My parents would frisk me before family events, and find the book, and lock it in the car. And then be disappointed where, somewhere at the event, I would find a book and sit under a table where nobody could get me and go back into book land.
I've got libraries in my blood.
I'm Charles Baker Harris...I can read
Much that is great in literature is an acquired taste, and you have to acquire it in the first place. Our job as parents is essentially to pass on the enthusiasm we had for the things we loved. That's how we'll get them to fall in love with reading in the first place and, hopefully, to stay in love with it.
From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
I even love the smell of books.
Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
