Quotes by Walter Dean Myers

“Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.”

“That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel. ”

“Tests were always easy for me. I saw them as games, saw myself as being in a contest against a mythical adversary, and welcomed the challenge.”

“Reading is not optional.”

“Were suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they dont read but, actually, were condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their m...”

“All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.”

“Books have always been among my most trusted of friends, Mr. Linden replied. The best of them allow the mind to wander wherever the author's musings lead.”

“Yeah, its hard, babyIts hard right down to the boneI said Oh, its hard babyIts hard right down to the very boneIts hard when youre a womanAnd you find yourself all aloneIve been flapping and scrapp...”

“Go. Think. Turn black into white.Night into day. I am tired of thinking.I know where it will lead me and I dontWant to be there.Go love. Do your thinking.”

“Let me thinkThinking is all I haveIf wisdom is a pretenseThen let me pretend to be wise”

“Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.”

“You are not in Disneyland, he said. The little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you rem...”

“All the authors I studied, all the historical figures, with the exception of George Washington Carver, and all those figures I looked upon as having importance were white men. I didn't mind that th...”

“I mean, if you think about doing things to people like that, if you think about it too much, it gets all up in you and you can't control it after a while. Then they really got you.”

“When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.”

“...when we feel powerless, we stop trying to find a better way.”

“Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I'm in.”

“There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male... The other voice, the one I had f...”

“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 fr...”

“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.”