Walter Dean Myers Quotes

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.

Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.

I can't promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.

I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I'll be happy.

I have said it often and I will say it again: I believe you learn to read when you are young, then read to learn for the rest of your life.

Let all the time you can get be spent in trying to learn to read.

If children are reading well by the 3rd or 4th grade then everything else works.

I started reading when I was about three, a little over three.

Like measles, the reading bug is best caught when you are young.

I think reading is important in any form. I think a person who's trying to learn to like reading should start off reading about a topic they are interested in, or a person they are interested in.

I have always advised men to read.

I had begun reading earlier than most because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

Let's put in place programs to ensure that all of our children are reading by third grade.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

You can't write if you don't read.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

I care about reading, a lot. It's a big part of my life.

My dad's passion was to teach adults to read so they could read to their kids.

If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.

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

If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

I read a lot as a kid and in high school.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading.

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.