Walter Dean Myers

You are not in Disneyland,_ he said. __he little people you see running around over here are not Mouseketeers. Some of them are friendly, and some of them have a strong desire to kill you. If you remember that, and manage to kill them before they kill you, then you have a good chance of getting through your year of service here.

Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.

Yeah, it__ hard, babyIt__ hard right down to the boneI said Oh, it__ hard babyIt__ hard right down to the very boneIt__ hard when you__e a womanAnd you find yourself all aloneI__e been flapping and scrappingAnd running from door to doorYou know I__e been flapping and scrapping, honeyRunning from door to door

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

We__e suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don__ read but, actually, we__e condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, __ake this or you__e going to die._ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

Reading is not optional.

That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel.

Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.

Books have always been among my most trusted of friends, Mr. Linden replied. The best of them allow the mind to wander wherever the author's musings lead.

Tests were always easy for me. I saw them as games, saw myself as being in a contest against a mythical adversary, and welcomed the challenge.

I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.

My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.

I had seen the ballet of 'Swan Lake' as a child but it was as an adult, when I saw a production featuring Erik Bruhn, that I first noticed how significant a part the ever-present threat of violence played. This juxtaposition of great beauty and grace with a backdrop of pure evil stayed with me for years.

I think it's difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They're embarrassed to have people see them doing it.

I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male... The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.