Top 33 Walter Dean Myers Quotes

My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn’t read.

We need to tell young people that America was built by men and women of all colors and that the future of this country is dependent on the participation of all of our citizens.

I had seen the ballet of ‘Swan Lake’ as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years.

I write in a small office at home.

I think that what we need to do is say, ‘Reading is going to really affect your life.’ You take a black man who doesn’t have a job, but you say to him, ‘Look, you can make a difference in your child’s life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.’ That’s what I would like to do.

I talk to myself out loud at times, and feel embarrassed when people overhear me.

Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.

So many organizations have a mentoring arm, but they don’t really do it. Their idea of mentoring a kid is giving them general advice. But what they need to do is read with children.

I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I think it’s difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They’re embarrassed to have people see them doing it.

As a child I wanted to be a professional athlete or lawyer.

If what I read doesn’t reflect my life – whether I’m gay or Latino or on welfare – doesn’t that really mean that my life is not valuable?

I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.

I couldn’t speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.

There have been two areas identified as being vital to reading – and that’s for very young children between the ages of one month and five years and for teenagers. I’ve been trying to find ways of approaching both groups.

I’ll never live to write all the stories I have in my head.

I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the ‘National Enquirer,’ I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.

I remember one time being told I could not play in a basketball game at the College of William and Mary because I was black, even though I was playing with a United States Army team.

There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.

When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.

I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I’ll be happy.

My younger brother’s death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In ‘Fallen Angels’ I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.

I don’t want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it’s a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you’re going to suffer. There’s a difference to be made – and you can make it if you read with your child.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart – often for years – until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.

I want young people to be hesitant to glorify war and to demand of their leaders justification for the sacrifices they ask of our citizens.

I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude – I dare you to entertain me.

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.

As a kid I didn’t see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn’t do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don’t read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.