Childhood Reading Quotes

#1. I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.

Rebecca Stead

#2. Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.

Anthony Marra

#3. Childhood reading is so important.

Kristi Yamaguchi

#4. I mean that reading forms your opinions, your worldview, especially childhood reading, and anything that does that has an impact. So call them friends, call some stories enemies if you want, but don't deny their influence.

Katherine Reay

#5. I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.

J.G. Ballard

#6. In the tapestry of childhood, what stands out is not the splashy, blow-out trips to Disneyland but the common threads that run throughout and repeat: the family dinners, nature walks, reading together at bedtime, Saturday morning pancakes.

Kim John Payne

#7. I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.

Rebecca Stead

#8. Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories!

A.B. Guthrie Jr.

#9. The books you read in childhood shape the person you become.

Paula Berinstein

#10. Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

#11. Children's and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that's why so many adults read YA: we're never done coming of age.

Betsy Cornwell

#12. No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

Marcel Proust

#13. There's a different flavor to children's literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

Mizuki Nomura

#14. If it's a good book, anyone will read it. I'm totally unashamed about still reading things I loved in my childhood.

J.K. Rowling

#15. I grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Reading, PA. It was the most magical fun childhood. We had grape arbours and we would make jam with my mom. My dad would go to work and he'd come home. He'd clean out stalls and fix split-row fences.

Taylor Swift

#16. It's funny reading about how I behaved in the days before memories formed. So thanks for that input, Mom and Dad - wasn't so bad after all.

Connor Franta

#17. On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

Marcel Proust

#18. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Marcel Proust

#19. I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.

Colleen McCullough

#20. Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

Neil Postman

#21. I had a pretty regular childhood, with a rad mum who taught me to love reading and thinking and laughing, and (as far as I was concerned) a regular dad who drove trucks for a living and did radio interviews on weekends and got stopped in the street a lot when we went out.

Brooke Fraser

#22. Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder ...

Eleanor Brown

#23. It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.

C.S. Lewis

#24. Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it's frustrations and confusions, too.

Chelsey Philpot

#25. I was born and raised in Ohio. During my childhood, I spent most of my time drawing and reading fairy tales and myths.

Natalie Babbitt

#26. There is no ME without books; they're everything I remember from childhood, from maturity ... All that's happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

Spencer Gordon

#27. At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

Alberto Manguel

#28. I think the closest thing to a time machine that I've ever found is the Children's section of a library.

AnnaMarie Ralph

#29. Constant reading pulled me away from the world of my childhood, the world of my parents.

Maureen Corrigan

#30. I held up the book - Green Eggs and Ham - and began reading. I smiled; it was one of my favorite books from my childhood.

Angela Graham

#31. I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another. That was my parents, who exposed me to their stories. That's how I was introduced to the whole idea of not just reading, but storytelling in general.

Christopher Meledandri

#32. I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.

Philip Kerr

#33. I've gone from a kid who was sneaking out of my childhood house and lying to my parents to do shows in a community theatre in Reading, PA, to now having two shows on Broadway opening within two months of each other. That's sort of crazy, that trajectory.

Douglas Carter Beane

#34. The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

Lewis Buzbee

#35. I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Margaret Atwood

#36. I just ... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of ... rather an introverted child, probably.

Helen Garner

#37. Aunt Syl must have conveniently stopped reading the childhood fairy tales when the knight left the damsel in distress to pursue a better damsel out of my bedtime routine.

Rachel Higginson

#38. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#39. As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave ... an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left over from the lunch that is found caught between the teeth.

David Brin

#40. I don't want you to think that I'm up late reading a stack of Spider-Man comics and eating a tray of lemon cookies while sucking my thumb. I'm not doing that. But I am loyal to the influences of my childhood.

Nicolas Cage

#41. So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books.

Luisa Weiss

#42. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

#43. What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

Sarah Jio

#44. Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.

Woody Allen

#45. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.

Betsy Hearne

#46. Dad always explained the car engine when he repaired it, and he had many technical books, so I was making electromagnets by age eight as well as reading my mother's medical and nursing books. I suspect I was born with a boundless curiosity, and this was encouraged through my childhood.

Barry Marshall

#47. In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.
A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine.

Sanhita Baruah

#48. Interest in reading memoirs is universal. What has happened is that people are writing about more and more outrageous things. Our threshold for weirdness - you can't have just a normal childhood - has gone way up.

Sara Nelson

#49. As a kid, I went to the library because, in books, there were people really living lives, and unlike my parents, they talked to me about important things.

Gregory Sherl