Youth Literacy Quotes

Kids absolutely not reading. I think it's because they're so screen-oriented [TVs, computers, smartphones]. They do read - girls in particular read a lot. They have a tendency to go toward the paranormal, romances, Twilight and stuff like that. And then it starts to taper off because other things take precedence, like the Kardashian sisters.

The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.

The space between the young reader’s eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril.’

I'm grateful for every teacher or librarian who reads a book and says, "This is exactly the book that so-and-so needs to read; I'll get it in his hands." I'm amazed at the network of adults who make sure that kids get books.

Unfortunately, a lot of kids don't read anymore. I don't know what we can do about that.

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.

Fifty seven million children across the world don't want an iPhone, Xbox or chocolates. They want a book and pen.

Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.

If we ever head down the American path of banning certain books or turning the editorial process into one of censorship, we will risk turning teens off books and sending them elsewhere - to their X-Boxes, for instance. To the Internet. And they won't ever come back to books.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

I think [kids] enjoy reading, but it's a different world now. There are a lot of competitors for the imaginative attention.

I think it is shocking that 15- and 16-year-olds leave school unable to add up and with the reading ability of a four-year-old.

I don't see a day when teenagers don't read. They are very enthusiastic. That is so inspiring to me.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

What I would like to do is make sure every primary school child has a library card, so where parents don't get their children library cards, we'll see if we can get schools to step in and make sure that every child has one.

Whenever I am with a group of kids, I always ask them, 'How many of you know about the summer reading program at your library and how many of you know it's free?' Spreading that sort of message comes very naturally to me.

I travel to a lot of schools, and I see firsthand that while we do still have a lot of traditional readers, we don't have as many as we used to. And we're missing an awful lot of kids entirely... Do I want to get rid of the Internet? Obviously, I don't want that because of all the amazing things it brings.

Kids just don't read any more. They spend much more time with video games. It's just hard to get kids to read anything. Book sales have dropped dramatically, too. I think 90% of the books are bought only by 5% of the US population.

People in their forties, fifties, and onward enjoy the whole world of books in a different way than the Internet-age kids do.

If you can get kids excited about reading, maybe that can open up a whole other world for them.

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

I teach kids to read on a Saturday for this charity called Real Action. It's a voluntary school because lots of the kids around my area of London are from immigrant families and need extra help with reading.