Education Quote by Margaret Haddix

There is a quiet flex in Haddix's line: she’s not just praising books, she’s claiming agency over them. The point isn’t that reading is inherently virtuous; it’s that a writer-in-training can strip-mine any text for craft, even the clumsy ones. “In general” signals a broad, lived habit rather than a curated syllabus, and “even” is the hinge of the sentence: the surprising admission that bad writing can be useful. That’s a stance that subtly demystifies literary taste. If you only learn from masterpieces, learning becomes a gated community. Haddix kicks the gate open.

The subtext is practical and slightly rebellious. Bad books teach you pacing by showing what happens when it collapses. They teach you character by demonstrating when dialogue turns into cardboard. They sharpen your internal editor because you’re forced to articulate why something isn’t working. This is apprenticeship by contrast, the same way a musician learns from wrong notes as much as right ones.

Context matters: Haddix writes commercially savvy, page-turning fiction for young readers, a space often patronized as “lesser” literature. Her remark doubles as a defense of broad, non-snobbish reading and a subtle nod to kids and emerging writers who are devouring whatever they can get. It’s also a reminder that taste is a skill, not a birthright: you develop it by encountering the full range, then learning to name what you’re feeling.