Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.

since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary.

Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.

The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact.

As cows need milking and sweet peas need picking, so writers must continually exercise their mental muscles by a daily stint.

If reading becomes a bore, mental death is on the way. Children taught to read by tedious mechanical means rapidly learn to skim over the dull text without bothering to delve into its implications -- which in time will make them prey to propaganda and to assertions based on scanty evidence, or none.

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.