41 Quotes by Jon Scieszka

'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.

Jeff Kinney's 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' series and Stephenie Meyer's 'Twilight' books got 49,323,701 kids reading.

Fiction is always pushed in schools as the holy grail of reading. Boys tend to like non-fiction more.

When I read the 'Dick and Jane' stories, I thought they were afraid they might forget each other's names because they always said each other's names - a lot. So if Jane didn't see the dog, Dick would say, 'Look Jane, look. There is the dog next to Sally, Jane. The dog is also next to mother, Jane. The dog is next to father, Jane.'

Don't push reading as wonderful or magical. For a lot of boys, it's not.

Reading is so important. It teaches kids to be analytical thinkers. If we turn our kids off from the very beginning, we're going to lose that.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

People say, 'All my son will read is 'Captain Underpants,' or 'My son is crazy about shark books, is that O.K.?' I want to be the person to say, 'Yeah, that's really O.K., as long as he's motivated to want to read.'

You need to be a reader to be a smart consumer and an intelligent citizen. To help boys, we need to realize they have a different take on reading.