What they remember:

Winston Churchill

I was, on the whole, considerably discouraged by my school days. It was not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the beginning of the race.

Hans Albert Einstein, on his father, Albert Einstein

He told me that his teachers reported that . . . he was mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.

Agatha Christie, writer

I, myself, was always recognized . . . as the "slow one" in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was . . . an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.

Thomas Edison - inventor of the light bulb and moving pictures (cinema) as well as the radio, television and computer theory, among 1,368 more patents.

My teachers say I'm addled . . . my father thought I was stupid, and I almost decided I must be a dunce.

W.B. Yeats

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

Biographer A. Norman Jeffares on William Butler Yeats

Willie was sent to lessons in spelling and grammar, but he never learned to spell. To the end of his life he produced highly idiosyncratic versions of words.

Loretta Young

I hated school . . . . One of the reasons was a learning disability, dyslexia, which no one understood at the time. I still can't spell  . . .

Nelson Rockefeller

I was one of the 'puzzle children' myself -- a dyslexic . . . And I still have a hard time reading today. Accept the fact that you have a problem. Refuse to feel sorry for yourself. You have a challenge; never quit!

Cher

I never read in school. I got really bad grades--D's and F's and C's in some classes, and A's and B's in other classes. In the second week of the 11th grade, I just quit. When I was in school, it was really difficult. Almost everything I learned, I had to learn by listening. My report cards always said that I was not living up to my potential.

Nolan Ryan

When I had dyslexia, they didn't diagnose it as that. It was frustrating and embarrassing. I could tell you a lot of horror stories about what you feel like on the inside.

Caroline Commanville, on her uncle, Gustave Flaubert

Having made a strenuous effort to understand the symbols he could make nothing of, he wept giant tears  . . .

Harry Belafonte

I grew up in a school system . . . where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.

Stephen J. Cannell, screenwriter, producer & director

Since I was the stupidest kid in my class, it never occurred to me to try and be perfect, so I've always been happy as a writer just to entertain myself. That's an easier place to start.

Tom Cruise, actor

I had to train myself to focus my attention. I became very visual and learned how to create mental images in order to comprehend what I read."

Leonardo da Vinci

You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills.

Danny Glover, actor

Kids made fun of me because I was dark skinned, had a wide nose, and was dyslexic. Even as an actor, it took me a long time to realize why words and letters got jumbled in my mind and came out differently.

Dr. John R. Horner, American paleontologist

I barely made it through school. I read real slow. But I like to find things that nobody else has found, like a dinosaur egg that has an embryo inside. Well, there are 36 of them in the world, and I found 35.

William James, psychologist and philosopher

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist

I just barely got through school. The problem was a learning disability, at a time when there was nowhere to get help.

Magic Johnson

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

Biographer Martin Blumenson on  General George Patton

Young George . . . although he was bright and intelligent and bursting with energy, he was unable to read and write. Patton's wife corrected his spelling, his punctuation, and his grammar.

Charles Schwabb

I couldn't read. I just scraped by. My solution back then was to read classic comic books because I could figure them out from the context of the pictures. Now I listen to books on tape.

Roger Wilkins, Head of the Pulitzer Prize Board

My problem was reading very slowly. My parents said "Take as long as you need. As long as you're going to read, just keep at it." We didn't know about learning disabilities back then.

Henry Winkler

As a child, I was called stupid and lazy. On the SAT I got 159 out of 800 in math. My parents had no idea that I had a learning disability.

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