Walter Dean Myers Quotes

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

There was a period when I had a hard time reconciling all the different parts of me in a way that I thought would make sense to others.

Apart from a small minority, teenage boys fall into three distinct categories: macho, metro, or just plain muddled.

When you're younger, it's hard because you're finding your identity, and then for 12 hours out of the day, you have to be a different person. So that's a tricky phase - as far as figuring who you are out and then figuring out the people that you're working with.

Even now, I change my style and clothes from one day to the next, but during high school I blended in. I think a lot of people are that way. I guess that's why I can write about an array of characters.

Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.

I have the potential to be very strong and powerful, sometimes angry, sometimes passionate. I also can be shy and withhold that because I am afraid. I don't want to freak anybody out with my passion... So I struggle with that all the time.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

You act at being a man, and before you know it, you are one.

I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'

We do become our conversations. We really will become our associations.

You find your personality real quick in school.

There are always two sides to a person. CL is me, and so is Chaelin.

As far as how I grew up, and who is in my life, it's still a very complicated thing as far as how I want to get that across.

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.

I feel that adolescence has served its purpose when a person arrives at adulthood with a strong sense of self-esteem, the ability to relate intimately, to communicate congruently, to take responsibility, and to take risks. The end of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood. What hasn't been finished then will have to be finished later.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

There's nobody to guide through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood. And that's a recipe for disaster.

Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

We strive all the time to give our life its form, but we do so by copying willy-nilly, like a drawing, the features of the person that we are and not of the person we should like to be.

With acting, I started as a kid and it was my safe space and the place where I felt the most free to be all of myself. What gets explored in our show is where that instinct starts and where it meets with career, and how that can change your path a bit.

It takes time to become myself every morning.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead... it all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something... that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.