Walter Dean Myers Quotes

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

George W. Bush was a little sub literate.

We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.

The basis of everything, of all knowledge, is the ability to read.

I'd read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.

I'm a very slow reader.

I'm not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I'm not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.

I'm a slow reader.

The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.

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

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.

Read, read, read, read and then read some more.

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

I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read with your child.

The biggest impact my father had on my life was teaching the importance of literacy.

The more you read, the better you get at it.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.

Obviously I had gone all through high school and into college, and you don't do that not knowing how to read.

I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a relatively slow reader.

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

It was a shock to visit a Job Corps camp and see adults who had been through some years of our public education system stare at a blackboard where a teacher was writing CAT or helping them write their own names. In another room men were learning to tell time.