179 Quotes by Walter Dean Myers

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.

To come right down to it, if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in--these are ingredients which make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.-- The autobiography of Malcom X

That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn’t bite Asians.

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

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

In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.

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 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 can't control it after a while. Then they really got you.

I've always found old bookstores exciting. Whenever I'm in a city that's new to me, I immedicately look through the telephone directory for BOOKS, USED AND RARE. Book dealers send me their catalogs, and I read them as carefully as I would a letter from an old friend, never knowing what treasure I might find. Sometimes the catalogs contain printed material other than books, such as old photographs, newspapers, pamphlets, postcards, and letters.