Jon Scieszka Kids Quotations

I'm just trying to get kids motivated to be readers by connecting them with a book they like.

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

Avoid demonizing television, computer games, and new technologies. Electronic media may compete for kids' attention, but we're not going to get kids reading by badmouthing other entertainment. Admit that TV and games can do things books can't.

If the day gets really bad, I can always pull out fan mail. Who else gets mail where kids write to you and say, 'Dear Mr. Scieszka, we were supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead. So I'm writing to you.'

Be a good reading role model. Show kids what you like to read, what you don't like to read, how you choose what you read. Let them see you reading.

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.

The big problem is just this kind of gigantic piece, of kids reading less and liking it less and so getting worse at it. It's kind of this terrible spiral: Since they're not so good at it they do less of it, get worse at it, do less of it. And it's really what I discovered five, six years ago when I started the 'Guys Read' thing.

I like to tell kids that I started thinking about stories when I first started reading stuff like Dr. Seuss and 'Go, Dog. Go!,' thinking, 'Oh yeah, that's funny. I'd like to do that.' And then writing throughout school, but at the same time I was studying pre-med stuff, because my mom told me I should be a doctor.