Walter Dean Myers Quotes

Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.

Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

If you can instill a love of reading in your children, they will be ahead of the curve at school and in their lives in general. Their imaginations will be stimulated. I thank heavens for the father that gave me that to begin with.

Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise.

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

No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.

The kids who speak well, are articulate and intelligent, are all readers.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student. And if you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams, it's going to be hard to go to college. So when your teachers say, read - you ought to listen to her.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

We wont develop until we accept that reading is a vital necessity.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

If every parent understood the huge educational benefits and intense happiness brought about by reading aloud to their children, and if every parent- and every adult caring for a child-read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to the children in our lives, we could probably wipe out illiteracy within one generation.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

A university shouldn't be a place of comfort. It should be a place of discomfort because you want to disabuse these kids of whatever prejudices or preconceptions they have when they come. You're trying to get them to think and develop, not be a Johnny-one-note.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.