A Quote by Walter Dean Myers

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.
We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.
Families with disabled children are praying for their kids to die before them because they have no support systems. They are very scared about who will take care of their kids and how their kids will have a dignified life after they die.
It is that bizarre thing. If I had kids, I, of course, would tell them there's Santa, but it's also just an odd feeling to be blatantly lying to kids.
Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips.They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading. Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.
When we wrote that scene about the Sleepy Kittens where he's reading the storybook to the kids, it's like we've had to read these stupid books to our kids, and we all want to just tell our kids, "This is really bad. Don't you know that? Can't you see that?"
When I take kids into the woods, I tell them, "What we're going to do today is going to be incredibly dangerous." And you just see 20 smiles go up. "But, we're also going to learn to look after each other, who to work together and who to understand and manage that risk." That's what it's about, you don't empower kids if you don't expose them to risk.
If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would've probably been them.
Black folks tell their kids they have to be twice as good as a white person? Well, if I tell a child of mine that, or that they have to be careful - that this is what a cop would do if you do this - they think something is wrong with them. I tell them death is better.
I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.
Here's the thing - I'm single, I haven't been married, I don't have kids yet. If I do have kids I would be interested to see them in my life, so here's a movie for kids and I'm in there and I'm supposed to be kind of funny for kids.
Whenever we can, we try to talk to students. If I can, I'll invite kids from a school to a sound check and take questions from them. I want to show them it's cool to play the trombone. Kids are influenced by what's accessible to them. It's hard for kids to be introduced to music other than what they see on TV and video.
Then people ask me if I'm worried about the effects of global warming on my kids. Well, obviously I love my kids and I want them to live to be a 100. So that's another 1.8. My kids' kids? Three point six. I'll just tell them we moved to Phoenix.
What President of the Airline is doing is, he's urging everyone to give up their frequent flyer miles for sick kids... But as I was reading this, there were two empty seats next to me. Why can't sick kids sit there? If they're so concerned with sick kids, shouldn't they have like a pen of sick kids next to the gate?
I was one of those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.
I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.
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