Walter Dean Myers Quotes

I suffered from a quite severe speech impediment when I was young, and keeping a journal was part of the therapy.

So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

But now I've been in the arena for 47 years and I stutter less today than I did in those days.

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.

I'm a lifelong stutterer.

I used to not stutter any. Oh, I did when I was a kid, I stuttered, I had a bad stutter until I was probably between the second and third grade and a guy got rid of it for me.

I have a speech impediment because I slur a lot, and they even make fun of me on 'Cougar Town' because there's certain word combinations that I just can't say.

I had this terrible stammer, so I couldn't really speak properly until I was 16 or 17.

But if you put a script up in front of me to read, or a cue card, I couldn't do it without stuttering.

I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.

I've stammered all my life, and it's fair to say that my stammer has shaped my life. It's made me make some decisions that I'm sure I wouldn't have if I didn't suffer with this affliction.

Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

I had a bad stutter when I was really young. I couldn't get a sentence out. Like, 'D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-ad.' And that turned into a mumble.

I did have a speech impediment.

I had a stutter when I was a young. I went to speech therapy.

I had no natural gift to be anything - not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches - not anything. So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.

This is unbearable how I talk.

More dreams are destroyed in bed than are ever found there.

I always think I'm lazy, maybe I could do better, I could make more effort and I always have the feeling that there is a glass wall that I cannot get through. But maybe when I get through, then it's over.

I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

The distance between where I am and where I want to be seems impossibly large.