Parenting & Family Quote by Cornelia Funke

The line reads like a throwaway list, but it’s doing something quietly strategic: it collapses “culture” and “care” into the same breath. Funke doesn’t rank reading above movies, or art above family. She stacks them with identical phrasing - “I love to…” three times - until the activities feel morally equivalent. That repetition is the point. It’s a small refusal of the old hierarchy that treats books as virtuous and screens as suspect, or creative work as more “serious” than parenting. For a modern children’s author, that matters: her career is built on defending imagination as a lived practice, not a precious shrine.

The intent is also self-portraiture without self-mythology. Many writers talk about reading as an origin story, a credential. Funke’s version is more domestic and less performative. The inclusion of movies signals she’s not policing taste; she’s acknowledging that narrative literacy is multiform, that story moves through pages and frames. That’s a subtle piece of cultural diplomacy in an era that loves to pit “book people” against “screen people.”

Then comes the emotional anchor: her children. It reframes the first two loves as relational rather than solitary. Reading and movies aren’t presented as escapes from life but as ways of being in it, in proximity to other minds. For someone whose work often centers on the power of stories to shelter, transport, and connect, the subtext is clear: imagination isn’t an alternative to family; it’s one of the ways family gets made.