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" I write in a small office at home. "

Walter Dean Myers

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" With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" We all know we should eat right and we should exercise, but reading is treated as if it's this wonderful adjunct. "

Walter Dean Myers

" Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my tendency to having my characters ruminate for pages. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

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

Walter Dean Myers

" 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 from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature. "

Walter Dean Myers

" I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check. "

Walter Dean Myers

" To fight for one's country, to offer one's very life to promote the well being of the United States, is truly a noble undertaking. But so is the vigilance of the citizen who carefully examines our leaders to see if political problems are being solved by wars simply because this seems to be the easiest solution. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" One of the problems is that kids who don't read - who are not doing well in school - they know they're not doing well. And they want everyone to be in that same category. "

Walter Dean Myers

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

Walter Dean Myers

" Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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? "

Walter Dean Myers

" America believes what's good for us is good for the world. It's very difficult to understand that that's not necessarily true. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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? "

Walter Dean Myers

" We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional. "

Walter Dean Myers

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

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" 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. "

Walter Dean Myers

" New York is my favorite city. "

Walter Dean Myers