I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
~By Edna O'Brien ~
My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think.
~By Josh Lucas ~
My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to know that he had a nice wife and kids and it wasn't the same any more.
~By Tom Hooper ~
When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.
~By Lukas Foss ~
Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me.
~By Hakeem Olajuwon ~
Sure, my childhood was unusual. All these eccentric, wild people frequented our home: rock stars, drag queens, models, bikers, freaks. But I was not this little rich girl. My mom and I lived in an apartment.
~By Liv Tyler ~
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
~By Graham Greene ~
There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility.
~By Maria Callas ~
I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.
~By Patrick Stewart ~
We sat down and told stories that happened to us in our childhood, to our children. They were all basically based on the truth. These stories were funny and poignant to us. They just took off. These are all stories from my life.
~By Howie Mandel ~
I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.
~By Marguerite Duras ~
Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
~By Bill Bryson ~
Coming from a barely clothed childhood as a swimmer makes me really comfortable with my body.
~By Estella Warren ~
My childhood is completely... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way.
~By Peter Jurasik ~
I had the pleasure, as Robin said, to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity.
~By Nolan Ryan ~
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
~By Rita Dove ~
Somewhere in my wildest childhood I must have done something right. Being able to make a boyhood dream come true is one thing, but to have a kid come along and thrill his dad like Brett Hull has thrilled me over his career is too much for one guy to handle.
~By Bobby Hull ~
I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
That said, let me add that Joan and I never want him to be a child actor. We both feel that it takes away their childhood and puts untold pressure on children.
~By Dwayne Hickman ~
I never had any childhood, for the word means sunshine and freedom from care. I had a starved and pinched little childhood, as far as love and merriment go.
~By Frank Leslie ~
My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the pest.
~By Steve Irwin ~
It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.
~By Lucien Bouchard ~
My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.
~By Paula Danziger ~
She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood.
~By Simon Hoggart ~
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
~By Giorgio de Chirico ~
I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.
~By Daniel Pinkwater ~
The rate of childhood obesity is just ridiculous. Anytime I can get involved with teaching them how to get physical exercise, I want to help in any way possible.
~By Shannon Miller ~
It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.
~By Alice Miller ~
I didn't have a childhood.
~By Pat Morita ~
For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.
~By Laura Hillenbrand ~
I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.
~By Rory Bremner ~
For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to my serene childhood.
~By Alfred Schnittke ~
It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.
~By Alice Miller ~
My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.
~By Robert B. Laughlin ~
I didn't grow up with my mother, and so losing her for real was like, some sort of latent childhood, some sort of unresolved issue. When she left for real, it was sort of like, I was done.
~By Billy Corgan ~
I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
~By Andrew Wiles ~
There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us.
~By Pamela Stephenson ~
I like consistency. If you've had a childhood like mine, you want some things you can rely on to stay the same.
~By Norman Wisdom ~
Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.
~By David Leavitt ~
In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.
~By John Ratzenberger ~
He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.
~By Herbert Gold ~
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
~By Robert Redford ~
Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.
~By Beryl Bainbridge ~
That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.
~By Satish Kumar ~
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
~By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~
My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.
~By Ray Charles ~
My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.
~By Bill Cosby ~
I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships.
~By Tommy Rettig ~
I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape.
~By Dennis Rodman ~
It was a great experience for a kid, because it was a bunch of kids playing on pirate ships and water slides, so looking back on it, it was the fondest experience of my childhood.
~By Corey Feldman ~
Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.
~By Kate DiCamillo ~
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
~By Sidonie Gabrielle Colette ~
I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.
~By Susie Bright ~
The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
~By Alison Bechdel ~
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
~By Amy Tan ~
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
~By Rollo May ~
I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.
~By Angela Merkel ~
But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there's a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.
~By David Gest ~
My kitchen looks like the one from my childhood - very homey, with a little bit of Alice in Wonderland!
~By Paris Hilton ~
My childhood beliefs became so much a part of me that even today I find myself automatically living by a personal standard of conduct which can only be explained as resulting from my religious training.
~By Robert Vaughn ~
I sailed through my childhood with a complete lack of any drama.
~By Kate Adie ~
My early childhood memories center around this typical American country store and life in a small American town, including 4th of July celebrations marked by fireworks and patriotic music played from a pavilion bandstand.
~By Frederick Reines ~
I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.
~By Charley Pride ~
I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training.
~By Saul Steinberg ~
I would like to go back to Wales. I'm obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.
~By Anthony Hopkins ~
My childhood was safe and sane. No abuse and no traumas. I was surrounded by a large and loving family who taught me the importance of hard work and a meaningful education.
~By Ronnie James Dio ~
We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.
~By Raquel Welch ~
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
~By Pablo Picasso ~
Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.
~By David Elkind ~
The events of childhood do not pass, but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.
~By Eleanor Farjeon ~
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
~By Ambrose Bierce ~
A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.
~By Pindar ~
It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.
~By John Keegan ~
I attended Sunday School and then church with my father and mother throughout my childhood.
~By Leverett Saltonstall ~
From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.
~By John Philip Sousa ~
You give up your childhood. You miss proms and games and high-school events, and people say it's awful... I say it was a good trade. You miss something but I think I gained more than I lost.
~By Mary Lou Retton ~
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.
~By Edvard Munch ~
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
~By Virginia Woolf ~
My childhood wasn't full of wonderful culinary memories.
~By Thomas Keller ~
My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.
~By Harry Shearer ~
My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.
~By Truman Capote ~
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
~By Marcel Proust ~
The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.
~By Desiderius Erasmus ~
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
~By Robertson Davies ~
Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die.
~By Soren Kierkegaard ~
I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
~By Patti Smith ~
Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
~By Alice Meynell ~
I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.
~By Suzanne Farrell ~
We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.
~By Kary Mullis ~
Anyone who has spent any time in space will love it for the rest of their lives. I achieved my childhood dream of the sky.
~By Valentina Tereshkova ~
I have no complaints with the whole childhood acting thing, because I wanted to do it.
~By Tina Yothers ~
Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.
~By Arthur Rimbaud ~
The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.
~By Garrison Keillor ~
I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.
~By Stanislav Grof ~
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
~By Margaret Mead ~
I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.
~By Robert Jay Lifton ~
You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.
~By Ron Perlman ~
I gave up my childhood for a career.
~By Brenda Lee ~
People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
~By John Le Carre ~
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