Error " "The text, ntext, and image data types are invalid for local variables"

I need to do within SQL is to query a database and then to assign these results to variables which are then used as parameters while calling a stored procedure.Within SQL you can not declare a text variable (Declare @MyText text;) as it gives this error:"The text, ntext, and image data types are invalid for local variables.Now I could make this a varchar(8000) variable but this is not large enough to hold all of the information and will be truncated.
Pls. help.