Young Readers Quotes

The Hunger Games' is for eighth-grade girls! Winners read 'The Art of War!'

Given how few young people actually read the newspaper, it's a good thing they'll be reading a newspaper on a screen.

Many people, especially young people, would like to be more independent and on their own. But it is very difficult and they suffer from feelings of isolation. I think that is one reason why young readers support my work.

Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about critics.

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 have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

I was a kid who loved to read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't have one favorite book. I had lots of favorite books: 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton, 'Paddington' by Michael Bond, 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'Stuart Little' by EB White, 'A Cricket in Times Square,' all the Beverly Cleary books.

The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of 'The Hobbit,' is of a kid's adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.

After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

As a kid, I always loved serialized books. It's the reason why people love 'Harry Potter.' Serialization is amazing. It works in television. It works in film and it works in books. Especially when you're a young kid, you get attached to these characters.

I think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf.

My first memory of the Harry Potter series was my little brother just falling into those books and not resurfacing until he was done. That J.K. Rowling got an entire generation reading is extraordinary - I'm amazed, thrilled, and proud to now be portraying one of that phenomenal writer's characters.

If no one speaks out for [young readers], if they don’t speak out for themselves, all they’ll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. Instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object... In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced — writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices — and all because of fear.

When I was in kindergarten, I entered a competition and read 52 books in a week.

When I see kids standing next to their mothers at book signings, clutching a copy of 'Forever,' I know what's coming. They'll say to me, 'How old do I have to be to read this?' hoping I'll give them permission. But I can't do that.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.

We want a book to be a book. We'll have all the interactive bells and whistles but our intent is to engage young people in reading, not to show them a movie.

For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.