Quotes by Walter Dean Myers

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.

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

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

Thats whats wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they dont even tell you how they feel.

Reading is not optional.

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

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

Yeah, it’s hard, babyIt’s hard right down to the boneI said Oh, it’s hard babyIt’s hard right down to the very boneIt’s hard when you’re a womanAnd you find yourself all aloneI’ve been flapping and scrappingAnd running from door to doorYou know I’ve been flapping and scrapping, honeyRunning from door to door

Fools commit suicide and think theyre 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 remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

Go. Think. Turn black into white.Night into day. I am tired of thinking.I know where it will lead me and I don’tWant 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

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 didnt mind that they were men, or even white men. What I did mind was that being white seemed to play so important a part in the assigning of values.

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 cant control it after a while. Then they really got you.

When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet hes 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 Im in.

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.

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.