Walter Dean Myers Quotes

I guess I probably took New York for granted. Growing up, playing in the street, going down to the Avenue to the record store and to the grocery store and stuff like that.

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.

It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.

From age nine, my friends and I were on the streets, walking home, going to each other's houses, going to the store. I really wanted to write about that: the independence that's a little bit scary but also a really positive thing in a lot of ways.

I never really thought of my neighborhood in South Philly as being a neighborhood; it was more a state of mind. For people who aren't familiar with those kinds of places, it's a whole different thing. Like, 42nd Street in New York City is a state of mind.

I grew up in a slum neighborhood - rows of tenements, with stoops, and kids all over the street. It was a real neighborhood - we played kick-the-can and ring-a-levio.

Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.

We grew up in Woolton, Liverpool. We didn't have much, but it was irrelevant. We played out a lot with all the kids on the street.

How you act, walk, look and talk is all part of Hip Hop culture. And the music is colorless. Hip Hop music is made from Black, brown, yellow, red and white.

As a kid in the projects, I always looked forward to spring break. We'd either have cousins visiting us for the week from up north, and we'd all play sports together, or sometimes I'd go to Vero Beach and hang with my cousins there.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I remember that my mother used to take me to see ballets, especially if there were black people in them.

I like the streets. I grew up in the streets.

I do miss the Chocolate City of my youth.

I'm going to make my own 'Trapped In The Closet' one day, about a black kid growing up in the hood.

Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century for black writers, artists, and intellectuals as much as it was for their white counterparts.

I read everything, but particularly, growing up in a household where my mom was black and my dad was white, I remember really loving 'Ebony' and 'Essence.' Those magazines were the only place where I could see images of women who looked like me or my mom.

Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.

I grew up on the streets of Baltimore, a city I love to this very day.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

I had great memories of growing up in a working class estate. I remember it being sunny all the time. So we're putting that on screen. It's not people wallowing in degradation.

In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.

Black-ish is really a show about an American family and these are some of the topics that come up - for all of us, in different ways - and we get to see how this family is walking through it.

Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.