I couldn't speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.

I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?

I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check.

Walter Dean Myers Quotes