Quotes from Mem Fox

I have very little patience with children.

My mother was a very difficult woman to please. She was the sort of woman who thought that if I were praised I would get above myself.

I was the most Australian child ever in the world, even though my home was in Africa.

I don't know why some people have children at all if they know that they can only take a few weeks off work.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.

I think that my favourite animal is a baby possum, or a joey. The face of a really little joey is so divine - so, so gorgeous.

I think sometimes we rush through countries, ticking off the attractions, but that's missing the point.

I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn't feel different, I didn't notice the color of their skin, I didn't notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn't achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who's reading aloud—it's the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

The ideal three stories a day are one favorite, one familiar, and one new, but the same book three times is also fine.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent and every adult caring for a child read aloud three stories a day to the children in their lives ,we would probably wipe out illiteracy in one generation" Reading Magic Mem Fox

Read-aloud sessions are times when parents and children fall in love with each other. (Reading Magic)