Childhood Quotes

‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ – Graham Greene

‘Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.’ – Fred Rogers

‘Childhood means simplicity. Look at the world with the child’s eye – it is very beautiful.’ – Kailash Satyarthi

‘If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.’ – Tom Stoppard

‘One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.’ – Agatha Christie

‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.’ – John Betjeman

‘Childhood is a short season.’ – Helen Hayes

‘Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.’ – Maria Montessori

‘I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I’m spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.’ – Ricky Schroder

‘My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.’ – J. Robert Oppenheimer

‘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.’ – Marguerite Duras

‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.’ – Sigmund Freud

‘If the childhood obesity epidemic remains unchecked, it will condemn many of our kids to shorter lives, as well as the emotional and financial burdens of poor health.’ – Richard Carmona

‘New vaccines are being developed all the time, which could save many more lives and dramatically improve people’s health. And this goes beyond the traditional burden of childhood infectious diseases.’ – Seth Berkley

‘When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.’ – Sam Ewing

‘People ask ‘do you make a conscious effort not to swear?’ – if you’re doing silly stuff you’re not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood, who were funny without swearing, were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.’ – Tim Vine

‘I think if everyone would write down the funny stories from their own childhoods, the world would be a better place.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘Play is the work of childhood.’ – Jean Piaget

‘Vaccines are the most cost-effective health care interventions there are. A dollar spent on a childhood vaccination not only helps save a life, but greatly reduces spending on future healthcare.’ – Ezekiel Emanuel

‘I think it’s a great tragedy of childhood that you only really appreciate it once it’s done: it’s very hard to feel appreciative of the gifts you have until you’re gone.’ – Greta Gerwig

‘Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.’ – Diane Ackerman

‘There’s something about childhood friends that you just can’t replace.’ – Lisa Whelchel

‘Most of us have fond memories of food from our childhood. Whether it was our mom’s homemade lasagna or a memorable chocolate birthday cake, food has a way of transporting us back to the past.’ – Homaro Cantu

‘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.’ – Giorgio de Chirico

‘I’m one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.’ – Jonathan Coe

‘Life is the childhood of our immortality.’ – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.’ – Berkeley Breathed

‘Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.’ – Paul Auster

‘Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.’ – William Golding

‘Early childhood education remains one of the strongest investments we can make in the long-term success of our students and the long-term economic strength of our communities.’ – Abigail Spanberger

‘Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.’ – Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.’ – Louise J. Kaplan

‘Most of my childhood is a big blur, ’cause I needed better glasses.’ – Wendy Liebman

‘My childhood is a part of my story, and it’s why I’m who I am today and why my career is what it is.’ – Misty Copeland

‘I look back to a happy childhood.’ – Catherine Helen Spence

‘I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.’ – Taylor Swift

‘My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.’ – Ray Charles

‘I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.’ – Mary Oliver

‘I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.’ – Kurt Cobain

‘Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal… ‘Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?” – Steven Wright

‘There was an undercurrent of poverty throughout my childhood. We lived with my grandmother in her two-bedroom flat, and I slept with my parents. We had cheap holidays, I had to save for my bike and get a paper round as soon as I was old enough.’ – Bernard Hill

‘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 past.’ – Steve Irwin

‘A chef’s palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.’ – Marco Pierre White

‘Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions.’ – Yayoi Kusama

‘Vaccinations absolutely work, and have dramatically decreased rates of childhood diseases.’ – Ben Shapiro

‘I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.’ – Andrew Wiles

‘Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It’s less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.’ – Tim Burton

‘A happy childhood… is the worst possible preparation for life.’ – Kinky Friedman

‘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.’ – Margaret Mead

‘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.’ – Soren Kierkegaard

‘Childhood is a promise that is never kept.’ – Ken Hill

‘Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man, youth never.’ – Anna Jameson

‘I had a rough childhood coming up, and I just took all that negative energy and made it very positive for myself to drive me. I’m a very driven person. I have passion that almost scares people, just to be successful and make it no matter what.’ – David Goggins

‘Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.’ – Lydia M. Child

‘Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.’ – Alex Pareene

‘No one can travel your own road for you; you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems from my childhood. I grew up in a family with a system of religious beliefs handed down to me.’ – Amy Tan

‘I remember feeling guilty that I had a good childhood. I thought everybody who is famous has to have a desperate childhood and work his way out of it, but I had a great one.’ – Tomie dePaola

‘I always remember my childhood house with happy memories. There was a beautiful garden, and outside my bedroom window was a jasmine vine which would open in the evenings, giving off a divine scent.’ – Carolina Herrera

‘Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.’ – Andy Goldsworthy

‘The rise of childhood obesity has placed the health of an entire generation at risk.’ – Tom Vilsack

‘How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.’ – Harold Ramis

‘Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.’ – Anthony Bourdain

‘The most important influence in my childhood was my father.’ – DeForest Kelley

‘A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.’ – Pindar

‘To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.’ – Annie Besant

‘Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.’ – David Elkind

‘I think that’s something that all mothers have to deal with, especially single mothers. We work, and we have to leave the kids behind. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we, not only as women but as families, we have to advocate for early childhood education for all of our children.’ – Dolores Huerta

‘I would trade everything I have to have had a happier childhood.’ – Louie Anderson

‘As an Indian and as a Hindu, I have been taught to see God everywhere right from my childhood.’ – Alok Nath

‘If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.’ – Buzz Aldrin

‘A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.’ – Robertson Davies

‘I have dual citizenship; it just so happens I live in America. 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.’ – Anthony Hopkins

‘Candy is childhood, the best and bright moments you wish could have lasted forever.’ – Dylan Lauren

‘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.’ – Rita Dove

‘To have your childhood dream realized is a really big deal.’ – Maya Rudolph

‘The research clearly demonstrates high-quality early childhood opportunities help children succeed.’ – Tim Kaine

‘I went to a public high school that had a very small graduating class of 156 students. I lived a relatively normal childhood until I turned probably around 16. Things started to take off career-wise.’ – Jesse McCartney

‘Genius is childhood recalled at will.’ – Charles Baudelaire

‘If we expect our children to thrive at our colleges and universities, and succeed in our economy once they graduate – first we must make quality, affordable early childhood education accessible to all.’ – Kirsten Gillibrand

‘I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone’s imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life. ‘Back to the Future’ fulfills all of those daydreams. It’s the perfect movie.’ – Sasha Grey

‘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.’ – Valentina Tereshkova

‘Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.’ – Adam Sandler

‘Early childhood education is an urgent educational, economic and moral imperative. Without it, we face a long-term national economic security crisis.’ – J. B. Pritzker

‘I had a brother who was my savior, made my childhood bearable.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘I’m from Connecticut. My Mom is an army brat, and my Dad is a navy brat. My childhood was fun. My parents are still together. My childhood was pretty carefree.’ – Cassie Ventura

‘Since my childhood, I dreamed of wearing the Black and Yellow.’ – Marco Reus

‘Spontaneity, the hallmark of childhood, is well worth cultivating to counteract the rigidity that may otherwise set in as we grow older.’ – Gail Sheehy

‘You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for – if you are honest – you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.’ – P. L. Travers

‘It’s only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.’ – Maya Lin

‘I grew up in a humble neighbourhood in Argentina called Dock Sud. From my house, about 200 metres away was a football pitch. That’s where I spent my childhood. It’s a neighbourhood where everybody helped each other because there was a lot of difficulties. There, I grew up happily, because I learned a lot of things.’ – Javier Zanetti

‘As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.’ – Bernard Sumner

‘The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.’ – E. B. White

‘I grew up Valley Stream until my parents moved to Florida when I was 20. I graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1985. It was the best childhood anyone could ever ask for.’ – Jim Breuer

‘Investing in early childhood nutrition is a surefire strategy. The returns are incredibly high.’ – Anne M. Mulcahy

‘Tackling childhood obesity is key.’ – Diane Abbott

‘From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.’ – Harper Lee

‘There are vivid memories from my childhood – what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose, if I wanted to be fair, I could say that I’m trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers.’ – Cesar Chavez

‘I used to have Bible studies at my house. I was in the choir. I was mischievous but also a real mama’s boy. It was a pretty happy childhood.’ – Woody Harrelson

‘A lot of my stand-up early on was stories from my childhood. And my childhood is over – there’s not new childhood stories to come. They’ve all been mentioned.’ – Jim Jefferies

‘I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.’ – Narendra Modi

‘When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants – that that’s our purpose.’ – Karl Ove Knausgard

‘Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood – the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘Most of my childhood memories of my father are of being ignored. I was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested him. He enjoyed telling me I couldn’t do anything right.’ – Marlon Brando

‘There’s that bubble of childhood that makes you innocently do anything. Then, when you get older, that pops, and you’re aware of limitations and judgment and social pressures and things like that.’ – Pete Docter

‘I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality – you’re told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘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.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.’ – Roberto Benigni

‘I was born and brought up in the countryside. I used to live in a sort of converted stables on the grounds of a castle, and I spent a lot of my childhood running around with a pretend sword pretending to be Robert the Bruce.’ – Sam Heughan

‘My childhood was great, honestly. I have all these incredible memories of my childhood. I was an only child. I always had all my cousins around. I had my grandparents around. I had my parents around. I had my uncles around – whatever.’ – Action Bronson

‘All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.’ – Benjamin Spock

‘The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.’ – Art Linkletter

‘I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.’ – Shaun Cassidy

‘I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.’ – Karl Lagerfeld

‘I got bullied a lot when I was a kid, and because of that I thought for the most part that I didn’t really have a childhood – I had to grow up so quick and there was no real enjoyment in that for me.’ – Shane Koyczan

‘Most of us have unhealthy thoughts and emotions that have either developed as a result of trauma or hardships in their childhood, or the way they were raised.’ – Steven Seagal

‘When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It’s still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.’ – Elie Wiesel

‘Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.’ – Walter Savage Landor

‘In ‘The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow,’ part of the ‘Dear America’ series, I took my childhood bravery and stubbornness and put that at the core of the Navajo girl, Sarah Nita. It helped me to identify with her survival and to write about her courageous journey and that of her people.’ – Ann Turner

‘My uncle was a second father to me. I spent most of my childhood with him.’ – Rey Mysterio

‘I just had a normal African childhood; we played football a lot, but it was always in the street and always without shoes. Boots were very expensive, and when there are seven in your family, and you say you want to buy a pair, your father wants to kill you.’ – Yaya Toure

‘Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!’ – Charles Dickens

‘I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.’ – Stephen Curry

‘I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.’ – Thornton Wilder

‘There are those who seem to feel they have no choice about being jerks in the present because they had a crappy childhood. Well, that’s the definition of childhood; nobody gets out alive. You either get stronger from what you experience, or you turn it into a crutch, an excuse, a dodge.’ – J. Michael Straczynski

‘I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days – All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.’ – Charles Lamb

‘So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.’ – Gaston Bachelard

‘I am originally a surd who was born in Delhi in 1982, just two years before the Sikh riots, so all my childhood pictures are in baby frocks with ponytails, as my parents wanted to hide the fact that I was a Sikh boy, given the riots. My dad worked for a travel agency, and we soon moved to Saudi Arabia.’ – Karan Singh Grover

‘I had a very normal childhood, and my mother cooked very normal food.’ – Ferran Adria

‘That great Cathedral space which was childhood.’ – Virginia Woolf

‘I hail from a small town, Jamshedpur. From childhood, I’ve been constantly surrounded by people who are not so urban.’ – R. Madhavan

‘I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.’ – Charley Pride

‘Chocolate is the first luxury. It has so many things wrapped up in it: deliciousness in the moment, childhood memories, and that grin-inducing feeling of getting a reward for being good.’ – Mariska Hargitay

‘We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives – things we’ve learnt since childhood that we don’t even consciously realise are going on.’ – Derren Brown

‘I went through various stages in my childhood, as we all do, various stages of obsessions with people and things. And I did. I wanted to be the first white Harlem Globetrotter.’ – Johnny Depp

‘There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.’ – Marcel Proust

‘My childhood has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.’ – Louise Bourgeois

‘It is on us to support our children and early childhood educators as we work toward having a healthier and better educated state where people have the opportunity to live a more abundant and purposeful life.’ – Roy Cooper

‘I grew up in one of those households where, growing up in Detroit, you gravitate towards music and cars because we were the capital for a long time. Especially during my childhood. We were the Motown sound. We were the Motor City.’ – Jalen Rose

‘My childhood overseas instilled in me an appreciation for foreign languages and cultures, but also a deep understanding of the vital role of American leadership in confronting aggression abroad.’ – Gina Haspel

‘If you want to understand your parents more, get them to talk about their own childhood; and if you listen with compassion, you will learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from. Those people who ‘did all that stuff to you’ were just as frightened and scared as you are.’ – Louise L. Hay

‘I had a very, very interesting childhood, but, oh my, education was the primary focus in our family.’ – Katherine Johnson

‘I have a characteristic since my childhood. I don’t like living together with my mother, sister, or friends at my home. I have always preferred to be alone and independent and lived according to that.’ – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

‘Every single minute matters, every single child matters, every single childhood matters.’ – Kailash Satyarthi

‘In some ways, siblings, and especially sisters, are more influential in your childhood than your parents.’ – Deborah Tannen

‘The Rocky Mountains realize – nay, exceed – the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life-giving.’ – Isabella Bird

”Lives’ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.’ – Alice Munro

‘In childhood I developed a serious throat infection, and my heart stopped beating. I recovered from that illness with a voice that boomed forth like Kate Smith’s!’ – Patsy Cline

‘I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can, in turn, be a blessing to society.’ – Allan Bloom

‘The movies were so healing for me because I had such an isolated, lonely childhood. Going to the movies and having the lights go down, you disappear. If you have esteem issues, suddenly you’re in a void where nobody can see you. You are just by yourself in that darkness, and your loneliness is cured.’ – Michael De Luca

‘I had a nice childhood, even though I grew up in hotels.’ – Luka Modric

‘If we don’t somehow stem the tide of childhood obesity, we’re going to have a huge problem.’ – Lance Armstrong

‘My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn’t really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor.’ – Nile Rodgers

‘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.’ – Edna O’Brien

‘My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.’ – Isabel Allende

‘From the time I was thirteen, there was a constant struggle between MGM and me – whether or not to eat, how much to eat, what to eat. I remember this more vividly than anything else about my childhood.’ – Judy Garland

‘My brother, a businessman, is the main cook in his home and my sister teaches cookery. Good food and good music were the mainstays of my childhood.’ – Ainsley Harriott

‘I always felt that with an Antoine Doinel film, Truffaut was taking a vacation, that Francois could relax when making a Doinel film. All of the language came to him very easily. ‘The 400 Blows,’ I felt, was a collage of all his childhood experiences. Every time he felt an Antoine Doinel film was necessary, he’d make one.’ – Jean-Pierre Leaud

‘I had difficult mother, difficult childhood like she had. She is Sagittarius like I am. I almost died from broken heart because of love. And she really did.’ – Marina Abramovic

‘Quakers are known for wanting to give back. Ban the bomb and the civil rights movement and the native American struggle for justice – those things were very, very front-burner in my childhood, as were the ideas of working for peace and if you have more than you need, then you share it with people who don’t.’ – Bonnie Raitt

‘I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.’ – Susie Bright

‘Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.’ – Arthur Rimbaud

‘Mahanati’ starts its narration from Savithri garu’s childhood. And it is wrapped up with her passing away.’ – Nag Ashwin

‘You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little – the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.’ – Idina Menzel

‘Our problems stem from our childhood. Ray was, for so long, the only boy. Then I arrive and take all his limelight away from him. That must have quite a profound effect. I sometimes think that Ray was only happy for three-and-a-half years in his life. And those were the three-and-a-half years before I was born.’ – Dave Davies

‘There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.’ – Jesmyn Ward

‘My father is Moroccan and I have fond childhood memories of holidays there.’ – Laila Rouass

‘Feminism isn’t about hating men. It’s about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.’ – Robert Webb

‘I had a happy childhood in the suburbs of L.A. My parents instilled in us an appreciation of history, art and, most important, Motown. Jarron and I weren’t allowed to listen to rap until we were 12. After our birthday I dashed to Target and bought DJ Quik’s album ‘Quik Is the Name.’ I memorized every line.’ – Jason Collins

‘Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children’s hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.’ – Siddhartha Mukherjee

‘George Gervin was my childhood idol since I was little. In Oakland I had all his posters on my wall.’ – Gary Payton

‘I don’t remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.’ – Renzo Piano

‘When I was a teenager, I thought nothing would ever happen to me because my childhood was so normal. I had this complex of normality.’ – Audrey Tautou

‘Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.’ – James Henry Breasted

‘My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.’ – Emmeline Pankhurst

‘For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.’ – William Gibson

‘Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.’ – Marjane Satrapi

‘What surprised me about the Oscars was how familiar it was – because you’re in the room with all these people that have inspired you from your childhood to adulthood in the film industry. It feels like you’ve known them all of your life.’ – Octavia Spencer

‘My childhood memories are filled with hugs and kisses from both my mum and dad. My mum has a thing about kissing you an odd number of times: if she kisses you once, all good, but if she kisses you twice, then you know another one has to follow and, weirdly, she tends to go for the forehead.’ – Romesh Ranganathan

‘I always went to school, and when I was working, I had tutoring every day. I still had a childhood.’ – Sarah Hyland

‘I didn’t have a good childhood because I never could get along with other kids. I was the child that sat in the corner eating lunch by herself.’ – Jolene Blalock

‘There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her.’ – Adriana Trigiani

‘The importance of inclusive behavior was modeled for me early in life. I have many childhood memories of my mother – an entrepreneur and business owner – drawing people to herself and inspiring them with the genuineness of her interest in them.’ – Lynne Doughtie

‘Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.’ – Bill Bryson

”Under the Poppy’ is the love story of Istvan and Rupert, lovers and friends from childhood, who’ve been parted by jealousy – and a secret betrayal by Istvan’s sister, Decca, who also loves Rupert, with whom she runs the brothel called Under the Poppy, where the floozies cater to every taste from saucy to peculiar.’ – Kathe Koja

‘Smelling a crayon takes you right back to childhood. When I need to go back in time, I put it under my nose and take another hit.’ – Randy Pausch

‘Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.’ – H. P. Lovecraft

‘My childhood memories are amazing; I had freedom in every way – but I see everything from a different perspective now that I live outside.’ – Ana de Armas

‘I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn’t that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that’s when your creativity is developed, when you’re young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to.’ – David Walliams

‘A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.’ – Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

‘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.’ – Desiderius Erasmus

‘From childhood, I had been instructed in the tablaa by my father, along with the astaais and antaraas specific to our Gharana.’ – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

‘The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.’ – Rebecca Harding Davis

‘Success is to bring into existence, in adult terms, your childhood dreams.’ – Harlan Ellison

‘I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating.’ – Chris Cornell

‘I still love making hamburgers on the grill. I guess whenever I eat them childhood memories come up for me.’ – Bobby Flay

‘When I look back on my childhood, my fondest memories are those surrounding the dinner table.’ – Katie Lee

‘Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.’ – Alice Miller

‘My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘I had one of the most outdoorsy childhoods you could imagine. I basically lived in the woods until I was 13. My dad and I built a huge treehouse in our backyard in Chesterfield, about 30 feet in the air. And we’d vacation on an island in Michigan, where I hunted a deer that we ate.’ – Gabriel Basso

‘Everything in adulthood can be traced back to childhood.’ – Penny Junor

‘Everyone has a childhood, everyone had awkward years and weird stages. Mine were broadcast for eight years.’ – Tina Yothers

‘I’ve had a fairy tale life. I had a perfect family, a beautiful childhood, an incredible upbringing. I lived a lot of life but a lot of good life.’ – John Stamos

‘I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.’ – Dolly Parton

‘When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.’ – Fred Rogers

‘Childhood obesity is best tackled at home through improved parental involvement, increased physical exercise, better diet and restraint from eating.’ – Bob Filner

‘I had a remarkably happy childhood; whatever scars I have are self-inflicted.’ – James Carville

”The Little Rascals’ was set against the background of the Great Depression: the characters were living in poverty. It’s just that it wasn’t focused on it. It was focused on what makes childhood universal. We’re all laughing at kids because we see ourselves in them; we remember our childhood.’ – Sean Baker

‘I know that a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is about the most random place for a country singer to come from, but I had an awesome childhood.’ – Taylor Swift

‘I had a wonderful childhood, which is tough because it’s hard to adjust to a miserable adulthood.’ – Larry David

‘Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.’ – Paul Auster

‘In plain terms, a child is a complicated creature who can drive you crazy. There’s a cruelty to childhood, there’s an anger.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘I didn’t have a great childhood, and neither did Debbie, my wife, so we both try to give the kids not only the material things we never had but also the hugs and the love.’ – Theo Paphitis

‘I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn’t have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams.’ – Augusten Burroughs

‘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.’ – Edvard Munch

‘The most profound memory I have from my childhood is burning down my house at 6 years old.’ – Black Thought

‘My childhood hero is Mo Cheeks of the 76ers, No. 10. One of my all time favorites.’ – Aaron Boone

‘Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.’ – Madeleine M. Kunin

‘It is widely known that the effects of childhood poverty follow children through adolescence and into adulthood.’ – Chris Van Hollen

‘I had a lovely childhood. For family holidays, we went as far as the car could take us – we would drive to Florida, even though it would take three days. I didn’t know we didn’t have a lot of money because there was always food on the table. I didn’t have a lot of stuff, but I did figure skating for a long time, and I always had my skates.’ – Rachel McAdams

‘Directing is all tied up with childhood loneliness. It’s such an odd thing to end up doing.’ – Paul Greengrass

‘Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.’ – Soren Kierkegaard

‘From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.’ – Nikola Tesla

‘Since my childhood I always knew that India was a land of scarcity but this has changed ever since the BJP started ruling our country.’ – Sudha Chandran

‘My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.’ – Truman Capote

‘I’m from an Irish family and, even though I grew up in 80s London, I spent a lot of my childhood in southwest Ireland.’ – Roisin Conaty

‘As I have begun to write my memoirs, I have begun with my childhood; memories which were hidden, suddenly appear before you, finding expression through my writing.’ – Deepti Naval

‘Since my childhood, I had a great liking for Karunanidhi and admired his writing skills.’ – Vidyasagar

‘My childhood bedroom had wallpaper that was printed with clouds and rainbows.’ – Brad Goreski

‘A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.’ – Will Ferrell

‘I’ve always felt like a kid, and I still feel like a kid, and I’ve never had any problem tapping into my childhood, and my kid side.’ – Paul Reubens

‘My childhood, adolescence and high school days are unusually important. If there has ever been a time that I developed a uniqueness and sense of humor and the ability to organize, it was then. In those early days, I developed the skills that gave me a certain degree of success in American politics.’ – Lee Atwater

‘My father and his brothers and sisters were childhood Irish jig champions in the Bronx. At our family celebrations, they all get out and do the jig. And of course, the younger generation, me and my cousins and my brothers, we have our own Americanized renditions of the Irish jig, which is a bit more like ‘Lord of the Dance.” – Zach McGowan

‘It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.’ – Harper Lee

‘Always in my house, I have almonds, hummus, Triscuits, and cheddar cheese. It takes me back to childhood. My go-to meal would probably be pasta.’ – Anne Burrell

‘The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions – in a Freudian way – to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.’ – Boris Johnson

‘Winning the cannon was a childhood dream.’ – Mario Gomez

‘Of all my childhood memories, I don’t have any good ones.’ – August Alsina

‘I loved playing cricket from my childhood. My dad made me play in the streets, and my interest grew. He put me in a club, seeing this. My habit grew from that point.’ – Babar Azam

‘Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child’s death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.’ – Ezekiel Emanuel

‘I remember, as a federal prosecutor myself, it’s only a 3-year appointment, and they interviewed my childhood neighbors.’ – Sunny Hostin

‘I had a rough childhood.’ – Bella Poarch

‘My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.’ – Kai Bird

‘Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.’ – V. S. Naipaul

‘My childhood was rough, we were poor and my parents were alcoholics, but nobody was mean. I knew I was loved. We were on welfare, but I never felt abandoned or unloved.’ – Carol Burnett

‘Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.’ – Mary Karr

‘I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.’ – Li Lu

‘I was 20 when I was sentenced to death. My life had been on a one-way path to self-destruction for years. I don’t remember too much about my early life, but I think I had a happy childhood, growing up in Philadelphia in a loving family with five siblings.’ – Nick Yarris

‘I think it’s not inaccurate to say that I had a perfectly happy childhood during which I was very unhappy.’ – Joss Whedon

‘Right outside of Kansas City is Leavenworth, and there are, like, five prisons there. It was kind of the tapestry of my childhood. I was always fascinated. I wanted to know what was behind those walls.’ – Eric Stonestreet

‘While the majority of my childhood memories are beautiful, I also have experienced the challenges that Nigeria has faced since independence.’ – Jidenna

‘Using clothes to transform was a huge part of my childhood. But also, I’ve been acting forever, and wardrobe changes the way you feel, so it totally indicates the character you’re going to play.’ – Allison Mack

‘I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don’t think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest.’ – Dalai Lama

‘My sister and I had a tough childhood, but my mom always said that travelling is the most beautiful thing you can do in your life. She always showed us the globe and gifted me an atlas.’ – Nargis Fakhri

‘I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.’ – Steve Martin

‘My happiest memory of childhood was my first birthday in reform school. This teacher took an interest in me. In fact, he gave me the first birthday presents I ever got: a box of Cracker Jacks and a can of ABC shoe polish.’ – Flip Wilson

‘My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.’ – Narendra Modi

‘But when alcohol comes in, start running. Because there’s a demon there, and it goes back to her childhood.’ – David Gest

‘I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another.’ – Chris Meledandri

‘I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always – always – involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.’ – Rachel Kushner

‘Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.’ – Karel Capek

‘Why do we feel jealousy? Therapists often regard the demon as a scar of childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem. And it’s true that people who feel inadequate, insecure, or overly dependent tend to be more jealous than others.’ – Helen Fisher

‘I have had an interest in art since childhood. I loved to draw as a child and still do.’ – Dasha Zhukova

‘Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.’ – Margaret Cho

‘Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.’ – Tom Stoppard

‘If you’re walking down the street and you smell a scent, it can take you right back to a memorable time in your life, whether it’s a moment with an ex-girlfriend or a childhood event.’ – Chris Evans

‘Accounting for the unpaid care economy can drive progressive policies such as paid family leave, social security credits for early childcare, tax credits, and quality early childhood education.’ – Sri Mulyani Indrawati

‘In my childhood, I always played as Barcelona on the PlayStation.’ – Marco Reus

‘I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That’s what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.’ – Chester Bennington

‘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.’ – Raquel Welch

‘I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape.’ – Dennis Rodman

‘The fact that childhood ends is exactly what makes it so precious – and why you should cherish it while it lasts.’ – Alex Hirsch

‘Investments, for example, in early childhood and in our children return enormous dividends in terms of their own academic success, reduced cost in the health-care system, productivity and growth in the future.’ – Brian Deese

‘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.’ – Anthony Hopkins

‘The things I talk about with childhood friends are inevitably different from the things I talk about with friends who are the same field as me.’ – Park Hyung-sik

‘Let a man turn to his own childhood – no further – if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.’ – Alice Meynell

‘My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family’s possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.’ – David Suzuki

‘Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?’ – Robert Winston

‘I still find it quite easy to find my way into a child’s imagination. We’re all Peter Pan ourselves in some respects. Everybody should keep some grip on childhood, even as a grownup.’ – Tim Curry

‘From childhood, I grew up with a lot of apprehensions about my body and appearance. I was skinny, had acne on my face and suffered from an inferiority complex; I thought I was the ugly duckling in my school and college.’ – Jasmin Bhasin

‘All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.’ – Samuel Richardson

‘I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.’ – Alan Bennett

‘From earliest childhood, I have rejoiced over the Santa Ana winds. I know those winds the way the Eskimos know their snows.’ – Eve Babitz

‘I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.’ – Seamus Heaney

‘My childhood bedroom – if childhood could be about ten years old – had a bed which was under windows which faced north. At about age 10, I started watching the stars just move through the night.’ – Vera Rubin

‘I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father’s childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where my great-great-uncle worked after he emigrated from England in the 1880s.’ – Kim Edwards

‘Although I’ve never been in an abusive relationship, when my dad had a drink he could become very aggressive and sometimes he’d hit my mum. As a result, to this day, I hate it when people shout and get aggressive, and when people get very drunk, and it all stems back to my childhood.’ – Coleen Nolan

‘I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.’ – Alice Waters

‘I’m blessed to come from a family with five brothers. We’re all physical and athletic and like to work out, like to be outside, like to throw the ball around. We spent our entire childhoods on some kind of corner or in a field. We still do a Turkey Bowl every Thanksgiving. It gets competitive, man. Bloody.’ – Danny Pino

‘With a good education and a solid childhood, Marie-Antoinette might have become one of the most admired women in Europe. As it was, the empress paid no attention to her youngest daughter until an accident of nuptial politics made the girl a candidate to marry the French dauphin.’ – Amanda Foreman

‘Your whole childhood is just absent of choices. And then you become an adult, and every choice you make, you open some doors and close others.’ – Maya Hawke

‘In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven’t dealt with, it comes out. That’s why you have a lot of artists that don’t make it through.’ – Jeremy Sisto

‘I’ve never outgrown my childhood.’ – David McCallum

‘I have a vision of education that spans from early childhood to K-12 to college to the workforce. Because every step along the way is important: a chance for our state to do right by our kids and their parents – or to let them down.’ – Laura Kelly

‘A place makes a deep impression on you when you’re young. It lives with you. It’s like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.’ – Richard Eyre

‘People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation?’ – Gunter Grass

‘While shooting for ‘Kaatru Veliyidai,’ I was living my childhood dream of working with my favourite director. It was surreal and thrilling at the same time.’ – Aditi Rao Hydari

‘For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.’ – Harriet Ann Jacobs

‘Sweden will always be my home, since my childhood there was like a fairytale, so I’ll always go back to it.’ – Zara Larsson

‘I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called – appropriately enough – Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.’ – Seth MacFarlane

‘My childhood was spent in a typical Mumbai chawl at Girgaum and I studied at the nearby St. Sebastian School.’ – Jeetendra

‘Since the summer days of my Canadian childhood, I have loved to canoe across the dark mirror of northern lakes, paddling with an inside flick of the blade, leaving a trail of twisting whirlpools in my wake.’ – Rory MacLean

‘It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.’ – Andy Serkis

‘I was just angry cause of my childhood. You know what I mean? So I carried, so I took that anger with me everywhere I went. No matter what it was, so it was always heavy on me.’ – Eddie Kingston

‘During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.’ – Irvin D. Yalom

‘Nothing in my early childhood suggested to anyone – except maybe my father – that one day I would be standing here and be known simply as Judge Judy.’ – Judy Sheindlin

‘I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘One always goes back to one’s childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.’ – Elie Wiesel

‘I’m a really nostalgic person. I love taking photos and video and having memories. I remember all my childhood videos that my dad used to take. I think that’s really what life is about – especially when you start a family of your own.’ – Kim Kardashian

‘If I hadn’t become a chef I would have loved to be a top tennis player, although I was never good enough so it wasn’t really an option. But that has never dimmed my love of the game, which started in childhood when I was lucky enough to be a ball boy at Wimbledon.’ – Ainsley Harriott

‘For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.’ – Yotam Ottolenghi

‘My grandmother taught me to knit, and as I knit, my mind returns to my childhood.’ – Elena Roger

‘Growing up with the childhood that I had, I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless, and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.’ – Christina Aguilera

‘I don’t want to go all Michael Jackson on you, but I never really had a childhood.’ – Robert Downey, Jr.

‘I’m like the luckiest girl in the world. I’ve gotten to be a princess, I’ve gotten to work with the Muppets. A lot of my childhood dreams about who I wanted to be when I was a grown-up, I at least get to play them in movies.’ – Amy Adams

‘Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.’ – Edna St. Vincent Millay

‘My childhood dream was to study mechanical engineering. After reading ‘The Mysterious Island’ – which I read 25 times as a boy – I thought that was the best thing a person could do. The engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.’ – Dan Shechtman

‘When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.’ – Frank McCourt

‘When it came to my childhood – growing up in a single-parent home, often struggling financially – my mother definitely instilled in me and my siblings this strength, this will, to just continue to survive and succeed.’ – Misty Copeland

‘My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day.’ – Jane Fonda

‘That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.’ – Sylvia Plath

‘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.’ – Alice Miller

‘The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.’ – Clint Eastwood

‘Because of my childhood where I was constantly by myself, I always feel lonely. I have a lot of people that I absolutely love and I know love me but I can’t get rid of that feeling of loneliness no matter who I’m with – even with my children.’ – Natalia Vodianova

‘If I remember the suffering of my childhood and youth, it could make me sad. But if one thinks of the benefits, it is precisely because of these sufferings since I was small that I have become a man. I have become a person who thinks, who has feelings, because I have suffered.’ – Suharto

‘It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.’ – Fran Drescher

‘I don’t know if I realized that I was funny, but I realized how healing and important humor was in my childhood.’ – Bonnie Hunt

‘My early life has given me a great deal to draw on, certainly – but would I have swapped a happy childhood for the writing? Yes.’ – Bruce Robinson

‘I’m a songwriter who’s put my childhood memories and teenage angst into songs.’ – Paula Cole

‘Mera Naam Joker’ is really special to me. A girl, who had idolised Raj Kapoor since her childhood, was actually working with him!’ – Simi Garewal

‘I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.’ – Ross Douthat

‘Childhood is a tricky business. Usually, something goes wrong.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘I’m mostly influenced by life, what’s around me, and my own childhood.’ – Jack Prelutsky

‘For me it’s about supporting our Indigenous kids and completing that whole journey: early childhood, primary school, high school, university and then career. I want to be a part of that process all the way, wearing lots of different hats.’ – Adam Goodes

‘I can’t divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘I’m still Vanessa from the neighborhood. My parents own the shop, and I’m there all the time, that I worked in when I was a teenager. I have a child from my childhood sweetheart.’ – Vanessa Ferlito

‘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.’ – Ronnie James Dio

‘One of the blessings of my childhood was being a fighter and a scrapper, but being a fighter and a scrapper is a curse, too.’ – Jeannette Walls

‘When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.’ – Hermann Hesse

‘Not only was I the only black kid and the only poor kid, but my parents were transcendental meditation devotees, and I live in an ashram for a good portion of my childhood.’ – Aisha Tyler

‘If the point of the inner-child movement is to cure adult problems, it doesn’t work. Reliving childhood traumas gives you a nice afterglow, but it lasts only for hours or days. There is no evidence it changes adult problems.’ – Martin Seligman

‘I saw no reason why childhood shouldn’t last forever. So I created clothes that worked and moved and allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.’ – Mary Quant

‘My childhood was extremely unhappy. That’s not to say that my parents didn’t love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn’t come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.’ – Sean Scully

‘I don’t want to tell sad stories about myself. We may not have had a lot to spend when I grew up, but my childhood was good. The public likes to hear a dramatic story. They want a star to rise, have a meltdown and then return to greatness. Very American.’ – Gegard Mousasi

‘I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.’ – Margo Jefferson

‘The number one way that we can address these long-term challenges of poverty, of education, is to invest in early childhood education.’ – Julian Castro

‘I spent my whole childhood, my college years, thinking that I was going to be a doctor.’ – Karine Jean-Pierre

‘My brother and sister had a much worse childhood, I think, because they were older, and they had to deal with a lot more racism because they grew up in the ’70s and I grew up more in the ’80s. So they had to deal with crosses being burned on their lawn and their dogs being poisoned.’ – Mariah Carey

‘My childhood was very sheltered. I grew up in a palace. But I lived in Morocco as a Moroccan citizen.’ – Mohammed VI of Morocco

‘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.’ – Hakeem Olajuwon

‘I had a happy childhood, with many stimulations and support from my parents who, in postwar times, when it was difficult to buy things, made children’s books and toys for us. We had much freedom and were encouraged by our parents to do interesting things.’ – Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

‘My childhood dream was always to be on Broadway. I wanted to end up in TV and film. It’s kind of flipped, and I’m not mad about it, but my childhood dream is Broadway and I want to end up there.’ – Grant Gustin

‘One of the central memories of my childhood is of hunting – not well; I am a terrible shot – quail and dove and grouse on a farm on the Tennessee River.’ – Jon Meacham

‘I had a beautiful childhood, so my adulthood has been really frustrating because it’s – half the time it hasn’t been as good as my childhood.’ – John Lautner

‘It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.’ – Lady Gregory

‘I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I’d resided my adult life.’ – David Mixner

‘Eventually, I started writing down a bunch of titles that related to childhood themes and would pair it with an adult situation that either I was going through or someone else in my life was going through.’ – Melanie Martinez

‘That I am today the face of Louis Vuitton almost seems like a twist of fate. You dream back to front, wanting the rewards before putting the work in. And then you work, get on with life, and just sometimes these childhood dreams have a way of catching up with you. This is a true privilege for which I am eternally grateful.’ – Xavier Dolan

‘What I miss most about San Jose? I miss my family. I miss my house. I miss my backyard. My backyard is where I spent most of my childhood growing up. That’s my happy place. Anytime I need to go somewhere, that’s where I go.’ – Aaron Gordon

‘I had suffered from depression in my childhood.’ – Roland Orzabal

‘I spent my childhood in northern New York State, and like many kids, bugs and other critters fascinated me.’ – Romulus Whitaker

‘My experience in childhood and adolescence of the subordinate role played by the female in a society run entirely by men had convinced me that I was not cut out to be a wife.’ – Rita Levi-Montalcini

‘I went to the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, where I had a teacher really named Edward Shakespeare. He was a very influential figure in my childhood – I acted in high school a few times, but Mr. Shakespeare got me to lead in ‘The Crucible.’ I played John Proctor.’ – Robert Picardo

‘So many of us can recall growing up with Gene Okerlund as the voice of our childhoods while interviewing the likes of Andre The Giant, Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, Ultimate Warrior, Randy Savage, Sting, and others.’ – Natalya Neidhart

‘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.’ – Laura Hillenbrand

‘I love my childhood. It was a beautiful childhood.’ – Melania Trump

‘It was my childhood dream to become an actress, and I’ve worked hard to get to this stage. So I am enjoying the life of an actress.’ – Nidhhi Agerwal

‘We have a pandemic of childhood trauma.’ – Drew Pinsky

‘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.’ – Saul Steinberg

‘They say everything you go through in your childhood builds character and inner strength.’ – Curtis Joseph

‘My folks were drunks, and I had a rough childhood – really rough – in fact, rougher than I thought about.’ – Gary Paulsen

‘It’s been a habit of mine since childhood to always be looking around. When I go shopping, I have more fun observing the town than shopping.’ – Akira Toriyama

‘When I think back on my childhood and the things that happened to me, there were certain periods of time where I felt like I was being saved for something. I feel like I have a gift, and it would be a sin to waste it.’ – Lonnie Johnson

‘We are four sisters and when we joined the industry we were outsiders and we did not know anyone in the industry. However, singing was something that I loved doing since my childhood.’ – Neeti Mohan

”Bless Me, Ultima’ is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel.’ – Rudolfo Anaya

‘It’s so important to spend your free time with little people. They grow up before you know it. Childhood is gone in the blink of an eye.’ – Alex Kingston

‘The album that defined my childhood was probably Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Greatest Hits,’ whereas my half-sister, who didn’t have the same conservative upbringing, was listening to Cash Money and crunk.’ – SZA

‘My generation was a special generation. I was born in 1960 and in my childhood we were all big manga consumers that was the culture. We were brought up in manga. Manga evolved around what was being made to cater to kids. All children at that time read ridiculously thick manga books every week.’ – Takashi Miike

‘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.’ – Kate DiCamillo

‘I have many childhood memories of Eid.’ – Hina Khan

‘I think I became a writer because I didn’t know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.’ – Patrick Modiano

‘The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city.’ – Wole Soyinka

‘The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.’ – Isaiah Berlin

‘Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.’ – Said Sayrafiezadeh

‘I get stubborn and dig in when people tell me I can’t do something and I think I can. It goes back to my childhood when I had problems in school because I have a learning disability.’ – Ann Bancroft

‘I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that’s helped me in my writing because I’m writing about ordinary things.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘My kitchen looks like the one from my childhood – very homey, with a little bit of Alice in Wonderland!’ – Paris Hilton

‘I have one brother who’s five years older than me and he was a huge part of my childhood.’ – Bart Millard

‘Science and mythology were the topics which fascinated me since my early childhood.’ – Vangelis

‘I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time.’ – Stacy Schiff

‘I think the shyness one feels in childhood is often overcome with time. There are children who hide behind their parents’ legs, but you don’t see grown-ups hiding behind people. It just doesn’t happen. I mean, not that often. People develop social skills over time.’ – Susan Cain

‘My father wouldn’t let me take typing in childhood.’ – Pat Conroy

‘People say I am stuck in childhood, but it’s not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.’ – Tim Burton

‘We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don’t have public support for things like preschools.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘My mom and dad were ‘helicopter parents,’ literally. Meaning, I didn’t have a nanny, so I went up in the helicopter. My entire early childhood education consisted of tagging along while they reported on car accidents, multiple-alarm fires, and shootouts.’ – Katy Tur

‘When you hear the words ‘magic’ and ‘story’, they will probably evoke thoughts of your favourite fairy tales from childhood. Storybook pages abound with all manner of magic: fantastical fairies, wish-granting genies, or even a certain boy wizard.’ – Tony DiTerlizzi

‘I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I’ve only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.’ – Orson Welles

‘My father loved antique shops and shows, and quite a bit of my childhood involved outings to dim, dusty places packed with cast-off treasures.’ – Gail Z. Martin

‘The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.’ – Garrison Keillor

‘Since childhood, most of my friends have been Punjabis and I have lived in that environment for a long time.’ – Sara Khan

‘Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.’ – Thomas Szasz

‘In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions.’ – Elyn Saks

‘I was raised by extremely strict – but also extremely loving – Chinese immigrant parents, and I had the most wonderful childhood! I remember laughing constantly with my parents – my dad is a real character and very funny. I certainly did wish they allowed to me do more things!’ – Amy Chua

‘Some of the best dishes I can remember are from my childhood. Sometimes, whenever I want to feel like a kid again, I just whip them up for the family.’ – Rachel Hollis

‘My mom told me as a youngster I was always intellectual, like as far as being able to adapt fast and quick. But I had a fun childhood, went to regular school.’ – Chris Brown

‘Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.’ – Richard Dawkins

‘From childhood, we’re trained to be a certain way, to behave a certain way – so that the power base can control us, really. And punk and drag are completely outside of that.’ – RuPaul

‘I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.’ – Elif Safak

‘If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.’ – Krzysztof Penderecki

‘I had an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother, and though I look back fondly on my childhood, I think that when you’ve got four siblings sharing the same resources and a single kids’ bathroom, it’s going to get a little tense at times.’ – Jeff Kinney

‘She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she’ll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.’ – Nicholas Kristof

‘I am very lucky because I am realizing my childhood dreams, and after presenting my shows it’s like a party.’ – Jean Paul Gaultier

‘Denial of childhood and denial of freedom are the biggest sins which humankind has been committing and perpetuating for ages.’ – Kailash Satyarthi

‘Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.’ – Leonard Nimoy

‘Childhood reading is so important.’ – Kristi Yamaguchi

‘You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your ‘love map,’ an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems.’ – Helen Fisher

‘I spent a lot of my childhood not fitting in, in a lot of different ways.’ – Wil Wheaton

‘I don’t remember the first half of my life. All I say is a happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.’ – Kinky Friedman

‘I think anytime you’re writing to the middle grades, you’re writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.’ – Rick Riordan

‘My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.’ – Rick Bass

‘I stumbled onto the best profession to heal my childhood: the only one that lets you release and express whatever is ugly and messy and beautiful about your life. We’re in the business of creating human beings. The more we spew, and the more honestly we do it, the better. Try that on Wall Street.’ – Viola Davis

‘I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.’ – Eavan Boland

‘With a complicated childhood, you can either focus on the positive or the negative, and I chose to focus on the positive.’ – Jeannette Walls

‘When you’re Shredder for Halloween as a kid, and now you get to play him, it’s like a childhood dream come to life.’ – Brian Tee

‘My mother is a Telugu, so I have been familiar with the language since childhood.’ – Armaan Malik

‘If I seem to write most happily about the ordinary things that boys do who live in the country, it is because this is the part of my childhood that I look back upon with the greatest affection.’ – Christopher Robin Milne

‘I was going to be a writer, and that turned into journalist. And then that turned into a career in children’s literature, which turned into early childhood education, which turned into psychology, which turned into premed, which turned into nursing school, which turned into communication, which turned into marketing and advertising.’ – Damaris Phillips

‘I like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.’ – Aimee Bender

‘My father was out of my life when I was pretty young – when I was 7 years old, he was gone. I didn’t see him for the rest of my childhood.’ – Flea

‘For a lot of my childhood, I didn’t want to direct movies because I didn’t really know what directing was.’ – Peter Jackson

‘I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you’re in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism.’ – Andy Dick

‘Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.’ – Ezra Taft Benson

‘Childhood trauma is really what puts the rocket fuel behind addiction.’ – Drew Pinsky

‘My memories from childhood always involve a football.’ – Carles Puyol

‘I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.’ – Andrew Wiles

‘In my case, both my grandmothers made a huge impact on my early childhood days. But, as I grew older, people rarely made an impact or influenced me.’ – Sudha Murty

‘We produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.’ – Alice Miller

‘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.’ – Ambrose Bierce

‘When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.’ – Brian Aldiss

‘We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.’ – Sissela Bok

‘Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it.’ – George Will

‘He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.’ – Herbert Gold

‘Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.’ – David Leavitt

‘The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.’ – John le Carre

‘She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood.’ – Simon Hoggart

‘The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.’ – Bill Cosby

‘Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.’ – Ned Rorem

‘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.’ – Rollo May

‘Childhood is the sleep of reason.’ – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

‘Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.’ – Gertrude Stein

‘Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like – and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.’ – Hector Hugh Munro

‘To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.’ – Plutarch

‘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.’ – Bill Cosby

‘One’s age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful. Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place. At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it; but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful.’ – Thomas Arnold

‘Coming from a barely clothed childhood as a swimmer makes me really comfortable with my body.’ – Estella Warren

‘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.’ – Liv Tyler

‘At heart, this job is about continuing to make great theatre for the people of Sheffield – a city I’ve known and loved since childhood.’ – Samuel West

‘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.’ – Corey Feldman

‘I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.’ – Alma Guillermoprieto

‘It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion – something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.’ – Alice Miller

‘You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.’ – Ron Perlman

‘Nobody became an actor because he had a good childhood.’ – William H. Macy

‘My childhood here… was very limited. So it was a long, long time before I actually went out to Brooklyn.’ – Frank McCourt

‘When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.’ – Georg Trakl

‘It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn’t really. I didn’t use the beach very much at all.’ – Miranda Richardson

‘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.’ – Suzanne Farrell

‘Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.’ – Rob Reiner

‘If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.’ – Tracy Kidder

‘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.’ – Dwayne Hickman

‘My childhood wasn’t full of wonderful culinary memories.’ – Thomas Keller

‘Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.’ – Harry Stack Sullivan

‘People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.’ – Nigella Lawson

‘Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.’ – Sydney Pollack

‘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.’ – Daniel Pinkwater

‘For me, however, that beloved, glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.’ – Hermann Hesse

‘In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life – in jeeps – and upset all my dreams.’ – Sergio Leone

‘If only my folks had beaten me, I could have gotten some material about my miserable childhood. But as it is, I’ve had a great life.’ – Tim Conway

‘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.’ – Paula Danziger

‘I’ve been following what’s happening in Colombia because it’s the country of my childhood.’ – Barbet Schroeder

‘These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.’ – Peter Straub

‘The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.’ – Donna Tartt

‘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.’ – John le Carre

‘Remember Graham Green’s dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.’ – John le Carre

‘I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.’ – Dennis Potter

‘My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.’ – Robert B. Laughlin

‘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.’ – Alfred Schnittke

‘I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.’ – Michael Chabon

‘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.’ – Robert Vaughn

‘My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think.’ – Josh Lucas

‘Just this morning, out of a large memory for songs, and having been obsessed by them since childhood, suddenly, at the age of 84, I thought of a song I hadn’t thought of in over 50 years. It came into my head unbidden.’ – Tom Glazer

‘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.’ – Patti Smith

‘My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.’ – Poppy Z. Brite

‘I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We’re switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we’re in the business of transferring emotions to other people.’ – Derek Jacobi

‘Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood so it was a great honour to be in it.’ – Simon Pegg

‘Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.’ – Henry Williamson

‘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.’ – John Ratzenberger

‘Because of my faith and my imagination, I was able to enjoy my childhood, even though it was tough.’ – Donna Brazile

‘As I grew up in that world and saw how much it affected her world and how much it affected our childhood, it made me very aware of politics. Of course, I have my own private feelings and thoughts, but I don’t care to share them.’ – Natasha Richardson

‘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.’ – Billy Corgan

‘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.’ – Amy Tan

‘My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.’ – Philip Zimbardo

‘I find the subject of childhood fascinating. I explored this subject in Speak to me of love and I am curious about portraying the often painful transition into the adult world.’ – Sophie Marceau

‘It was a perfectly average well- adjusted childhood, not a bit unlike that of millions of other individuals.’ – DeForest Kelley

‘As for AIDS, it’s a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it’s a quarter; after that it’s a childhood disease.’ – Larry Niven

‘I was born in Somerville, but I don’t remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.’ – Alan Hovhaness

‘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.’ – John Philip Sousa

‘I think you never forget your childhood, whether it was happy or unhappy.’ – Marcel Carne

‘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.’ – Mary Lou Retton

‘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.’ – John Keegan

‘Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn’t do anything-or that it doesn’t do enough.’ – James Hillman

‘What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.’ – Martha Beck

‘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.’ – Satish Kumar

‘I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships.’ – Tommy Rettig

‘I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.’ – Harriet Ann Jacobs

‘The only difference between the Bel Air of the ’90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.’ – Lorna Luft

‘My early childhood was spent in Newark, New Jersey, but my family moved to Denver when I was 12.’ – Anita Diament

‘The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll.’ – Jerry Only

‘What is it like to fall asleep? What happens? Where do we go? Why don’t we remember? Since childhood most of us have wondered about the mystery of sleep.’ – Henry Reed

‘One thing that is almost always said to me is, I grew up with you. They are meeting me and feel that they actually grew up with me. I was with them during their play hours and thinking hours. I was a part of their childhoods. That’s one of the most amazing things.’ – Mark Goddard

‘I never have known a man of ordinary common-sense who did not urge upon his sons, from earliest childhood, doctrines of economy and the practice of accumulation.’ – William Graham Sumner

‘My instinct was that it was Sidney’s childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.’ – Lee Grant

‘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.’ – Pamela Stephenson

‘I’m living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks.’ – Patty Duke

‘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.’ – Howie Mandel

‘I didn’t have a childhood.’ – Pat Morita

‘And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.’ – Josef Albers

‘I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica of childhood.’ – Neal Cassady

‘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.’ – Frederick Reines

‘I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment… rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.’ – Franz Liszt

‘Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.’ – Ethel Waters

‘I attended Sunday School and then church with my father and mother throughout my childhood.’ – Leverett Saltonstall

‘Right now I belong to the wonderful organization called The Children’s Action Network. The first thing we did was immunize 200,000 children across the country against childhood diseases.’ – Henry Winkler

‘What is a normal childhood? We weren’t rich, we were pretty middle-class. My dad survived from job to job; with him taking care of so many relatives, he couldn’t save any money.’ – Charlie Sheen

‘The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.’ – Alison Bechdel

‘I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.’ – Rory Bremner

‘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.’ – Kary Mullis

‘I remember seeing war hero Jimmy Doolittle fly a Gee Bee racer there. He was my childhood hero. Many years later, I was lucky enough to go hunting with him.’ – Wally Schirra

‘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.’ – Angela Merkel

‘Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.’ – Gerald Scarfe

‘Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them!’ – Max Muller

‘I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.’ – Augusten Burroughs

‘As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened.’ – Augusten Burroughs

‘We cannot even recollect the actions of our infancy, our childhood is like something written on a slate and rubbed off.’ – Vinoba Bhave

‘The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.’ – Anselm Kiefer

‘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.’ – Lucien Bouchard

‘And we had a DJ – my childhood friend from Chicago came to be the DJ at our party out in LA. It was a party, rockin’ and rolling, and it was dancing and fun. For me it was different; just to have family with us.’ – Jami Gertz

‘When I look back, it was a strange period in my life, looking at my childhood and then my teenage years and forming Slayer when I was still 17, not out of high school.’ – Dave Lombardo

‘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.’ – Lukas Foss

‘Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘Typically diagnosed during childhood and adolescent years, juvenile diabetes, also referred to as Type I diabetes, currently affects more than 3 million Americans and more then 13,000 children are diagnosed each year.’ – Elijah Cummings

‘The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette’s childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!’ – Antonia Fraser

‘I sailed through my childhood with a complete lack of any drama.’ – Kate Adie

‘Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.’ – Jack Prelutsky

‘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.’ – Harry Shearer

‘I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.’ – Stanislav Grof

‘I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn’t like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.’ – Manuel Puig

‘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.’ – Peter Jurasik

‘We were just a gaggle of kids, and everybody played together and had a good time. You know how kids can be completely horrible – abusive but fun. But anyway, it was a nice childhood.’ – Peter Jurasik

‘I have no complaints with the whole childhood acting thing, because I wanted to do it.’ – Tina Yothers

‘The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.’ – Dennis Potter

‘Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.’ – Dennis Potter

‘Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.’ – Sandra Cisneros

‘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.’ – Bobby Hull

‘We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we’d never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.’ – Jon Ronson

‘I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one.’ – Maureen Forrester

‘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.’ – Nolan Ryan

‘My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier.’ – Orlando Bloom

‘My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.’ – Peter Shaffer

‘I had always wanted to be on SNL, it’s not always great, but it’s this leftover childhood dream.’ – Rachel Dratch

‘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.’ – Robert Redford

‘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.’ – Shannon Miller

‘One of the reasons I get so much joy out of my own children’s childhoods is that I’m having my first childhood myself.’ – Al Sharpton

‘I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.’ – Don DeLillo

‘Since an early age I was taught to be very politically aware and knew from childhood that the process was something I wanted to contribute towards if I could.’ – Adam Rickitt

‘When I moved to Seattle, I was hanging out with kids who had done drugs, had sex a million times. I look at them now and realize their childhood was taken away.’ – Jeff Ament

‘I write in that space between Ella’s childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.’ – Carol Ann Duffy

‘My whole family actually, but my parents. I had such a normal and amazing childhood. I’ve been so lucky. My parents are cool and normal. They don’t talk about the business and I still have stuff to do at their house.’ – Kaley Cuoco

‘But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.’ – Louise Bogan

‘I’m a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.’ – Robert Jay Lifton

‘My childhood was appalling.’ – Taylor Caldwell

‘Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.’ – Beryl Bainbridge

‘I was an escapee of childhood. I always wanted to grow up.’ – Uma Thurman

‘I didn’t have a happy childhood.’ – Giorgio Armani

‘From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament… the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.’ – Bernard Berenson

‘Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I’ve managed to grow out of.’ – Tom Holt

‘There are three terrible ages of childhood – 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.’ – Cleveland Amory

‘I gave up my childhood for a career.’ – Brenda Lee

‘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.’ – Maria Callas

‘Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.’ – Henri Frederic Amiel

‘Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald

‘Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.’ – Alexander Herzen

‘We have common enemies today. It’s called childhood poverty. It’s called cancer. It’s called AIDS. It’s called Parkinson’s. It’s called Muscular Dystrophy.’ – Jerry Doyle

‘The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.’ – Barbara Ehrenreich

‘I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.’ – Patrick Stewart

‘That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.’ – Adam Savage

‘I like consistency. If you’ve had a childhood like mine, you want some things you can rely on to stay the same.’ – Norman Wisdom

‘One of the things I want to do that’s outside the realm of acting and the arts – although both have their place in this – is ending childhood hunger here in America.’ – Jeff Bridges

‘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.’ – Tom Hooper

‘I’m incredibly boring; I had a very happy childhood. I never starved, nor did I have a silver spoon in my mouth. I’m one of those terribly middle-of-the-road, British middle class, South London gents.’ – Jude Law

‘One thing that people keep on saying to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood. But the idea of money – putting a price on your childhood – is ridiculous. You will never get those years back and you can’t put a price on them.’ – Tom Felton

‘What can I say? I deal with it. I think I have come to terms with my absolutely hateful and vile childhood. No, I have, really. But I did hate it at the time. I resented it. There were elements of it that were positively Dickensian.’ – Richard Griffiths

‘Acting is sort of an extension of childhood. You get to play all of these roles and have so much fun. Playing an athlete would be so cool. Or where you get to shoot guns, ride horses. I wouldn’t turn down any of that.’ – Jon Hamm

‘I didn’t have a childhood.’ – Katy Perry

‘I had a very difficult childhood. I was surrounded by people who had both parents, which made me feel different. Having a bit of a rougher existence early on, it made me appreciate the work ethic that my grandparents instilled in me.’ – George Lopez

‘I do not want any child in America to have my childhood because it was taken away from me because I just wasn’t good enough; well I am good enough now.’ – Richard Simmons

‘I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.’ – Ed Helms

‘Comedy, your funny bone, is formed in childhood.’ – Paul O’Grady

‘I didn’t have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don’t, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy.’ – Tyler Perry

‘My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.’ – Ross MacDonald

‘Families fighting childhood cancer should not have to worry about where they’re going to get the next dose of the drug they need to save their child’s life.’ – Amy Klobuchar

‘It really was hand-to-mouth and you can say, ‘Poor little me, how dreadful, what a deprived childhood’, but I didn’t feel that way at all. It’s all about the attitude at home.’ – Carol Vorderman

‘My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm’s fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of ‘Tom Thumb’ during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.’ – Gunter Grass

‘Growing up in the business you have to grow up very fast – you do have a different type of childhood, that has its benefits and it has its drawbacks.’ – Jodie Sweetin

‘What we did in our childhoods makes us who we are now.’ – Jon Heder

‘I loved my childhood. They had the coolest toys back then. Star Wars, Transformers, laser-tag gun sets. Toy companies have really gone downhill.’ – Jon Heder

‘My childhood was limited to mostly gospel music. We didn’t have, like, a lot of records in our house, you know. It was like my grandparents who raised me. They were pretty old-fashioned in their religious ways, so it was like church, church, church, school, school, school.’ – Faith Evans

‘I had a picture-perfect childhood.’ – Kelly Ripa

‘Listen, everything I did in my childhood was competitive. Everything we did my dad made it into a game to win. We used to drive my mum nuts.’ – Lee Westwood

‘I have worked very hard on being aware of my childhood but moving forward and not letting it bring me down emotionally. That is a hard thing – especially when you have children of your own and you remember what happened to you at that age.’ – Samantha Morton

‘On paper, it looks rough, but I had a great childhood.’ – Samantha Morton

‘The best mistake I ever made was believing that I was stupid. It was a childhood thing, but it played out big-time as an adult. It scorned me the rest of my life – in a good way.’ – Barbara Corcoran

‘Most everything I do revolves around tae kwon do. That said, I like to be a typical girl and go shopping. I have three nieces and nephews that I like to hang out with. I’m also finishing my last semester at the University of Houston, where I’m majoring in childhood education.’ – Diana Lopez

‘All directors are control freaks and very obsessive. I get the feeling that directors as kids, they all have had a childhood with not too much contact with other kids. They constructed their own reality and they continue to do it. It’s a funny breed, directors.’ – Stellan Skarsgard

‘I didn’t play video games because my parents didn’t allow it. That was banned from my childhood experience.’ – Kristin Kreuk

‘I had a stutter ’till… I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.’ – Nicholas Brendon

‘I’m the kind of person you want to kill. I had an incredibly happy childhood. I married a terrific guy when I was 23. I have great, well-adjusted kids. Sometimes my husband and I look at each other and do a little jig in the kitchen. This is the best life.’ – Jodi Picoult

‘I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they’d be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.’ – Jodi Picoult

‘I didn’t really get a normal childhood.’ – Evan Rachel Wood

‘I feel so fortunate, so honored, to have played this game that I love for so long, with so many great players, and in front of so many wonderful fans. I fulfilled a childhood dream the first time I stepped on an NFL field, and the league did not let me down one time.’ – Drew Bledsoe

‘I spent my whole childhood watching open-wheel racing. I spent years going to England and racing open wheel, coming back and racing open wheel. It’s been my world for 20 years and beyond that. For almost my whole life, I’ve been watching it. I watch it and I think I know how to do it.’ – Danica Patrick

‘I had a really normal childhood except I acted. It was like, my brother played soccer, and I was on television sometimes.’ – Shiri Appleby

‘A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle.’ – Rachel Stevens

‘Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn’t sure how to start.’ – John Grisham

‘I feel very warm towards Mum and Dad for giving us the independence they did. My childhood, and the fact we didn’t have a TV, gave me a boundless imagination.’ – Dido Armstrong

‘I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn’t have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.’ – Dido Armstrong

‘I still had a normal childhood with my friends from school.’ – Demi Lovato

‘My stepdad provided me with an amazing childhood. I played outside like a normal kid, I rode my bike, I walked to school, but the happiest times were when I was acting.’ – Demi Lovato

‘I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember, all I wanted to do was make movies.’ – Paul Thomas Anderson

‘I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.’ – Jeffrey Eugenides

‘Do not miss your children’s childhood. Do not be away 200 nights a year as I was. Do not put strains on your marriage or family.’ – Joe Scarborough

‘I’d spent my childhood thinking bad things, bad things every day. It had made me sick, but it had made me determined.’ – Julian Cope

‘I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father’s occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.’ – Arabella Weir

‘I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I’d spent a childhood in a far different place.’ – Berkeley Breathed

‘There is no correlation between a childhood success and a professional athlete.’ – Carl Lewis

‘Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it’s never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.’ – Carlos Ghosn

‘My childhood, I would say, was a bit sad.’ – Columba Bush

‘I’ve been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I’ve filled two journals. It’s a great thing to do as a mother – you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you’ve written brings all the memories back.’ – Tory Burch

‘Literature gives us a window into other people’s experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.’ – Natalie Merchant

‘I was surrounded by sisters. My childhood was all women.’ – Oscar de la Renta

‘I spent my childhood in an imaginary world – probably because I needed an escape. I think that’s one of the reasons people have imaginations – because they can’t maintain existence here.’ – Rickie Lee Jones

‘I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the ’70s and didn’t speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it.’ – Giada De Laurentiis

‘Smell is so powerful, you know. My grannies would both bake things like shortbreads and cookies. I think whenever I smell those kinds of things it really takes me back to my childhood.’ – Curtis Stone

‘I am extremely proud and honoured to have beaten Pete’s record as he was my childhood hero and I have always looked up to him.’ – Roger Federer

‘My childhood was really comfortable and secure, but school was a nightmare. I was a lot taller than the other girls and they called me Gitte the giraffe.’ – Brigitte Nielsen

‘You know, I’m trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I’m an old lady put them out like a book.’ – Shelby Lynne

‘I’ve been a musician since childhood, and music is my first love. I love it.’ – Steven Seagal

‘I had a serious childhood illness – sort of like spinal meningitis – that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn’t be insured because of a pre-existing condition.’ – Tammy Baldwin

‘I want my kids to grow up and enjoy their childhood and be carefree. I never really got a chance to be a kid.’ – Jim Morris

‘There’s something about strip malls that just reeks of my childhood.’ – Dave Foley

‘Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised.’ – Mitt Romney

‘College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.’ – Paul Ryan

‘Some people who’ve read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that’s the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a villain.’ – Jeannette Walls

‘My heart goes out to the Lindsay Lohans and Britneys who have really had childhood taken from them and probably missed important developmental steps. They have become sort of ‘public domain’ and something to be made money on. There’s no sense of self there, I’m sure of it.’ – Genie Francis

‘Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it’s beautiful, it’s tough, it’s buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It’s covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.’ – Greg Bear

‘When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.’ – Greg Kinnear

‘I live 50 miles from London and we’ve got some of the highest levels of teenage and childhood poverty in the country. It’s disgusting. Just because it’s a rural area, it gets forgotten.’ – Roger Daltrey

‘How many times do I have to repeat this: my childhood was fantastic.’ – Vanessa Paradis

‘The songs from your childhood, when you hear them you get chills all over.’ – Vanessa Paradis

‘I loved ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ It was such a big part of my childhood.’ – Megan Fox

‘I had a really nice childhood; I had great parents. I earned my allowance by washing dishes, and in the summer I earned my allowance by working in daddy’s garden.’ – Nikki Giovanni

‘Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.’ – Carol Ann Duffy

‘I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.’ – Tom Hooper

‘I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you’re going to be an Irish writer.’ – Maeve Binchy

‘My dad had a retail business in Leavenworth, Kansas, and there’s a whole bunch of prisons there, so it was a backdrop of my childhood, these ominous prisons sitting off the road.’ – Eric Stonestreet

‘I feel lucky because I was a nerd, which I talk about in the book, but I had academic success, so through that, because that’s what my parents put a great deal of value on, I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.’ – Mindy Kaling

‘I’ve been accused of being old before my time more than once. It’s true that I’ve always felt an affinity for, and been comfortable around, older people. I attribute this to a childhood spent around my grandparents – and even a great-grandparent or two. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.’ – Jon Meacham

‘I remain very much connected to my childhood… I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated.’ – Hugh Hefner

‘I’m very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What’s most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.’ – Hugh Hefner

‘I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.’ – Patti Smith

‘From very early on in my childhood – four, five years old – I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected – I was very tall and skinny, and I didn’t look like anybody else, I didn’t even look like any member of my family.’ – Patti Smith

‘All I can say is that I had an extraordinary childhood.’ – Barbara Broccoli

‘I’ve always reverted to a sense of childhood, just in everyday life.’ – Daniel Craig

‘To amplify our efforts, USDA is joining with First Lady Michelle Obama in aggressively promoting the ‘Let’s Move’ campaign, which will combat the epidemic of childhood obesity through a comprehensive approach that builds on effective strategies, and mobilizes public and private sector resources.’ – Tom Vilsack

‘My childhood, I would say, was a bit sad. Society resents that.’ – Columba Bush

‘Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family, like all parents do, but it was a hobby – nothing more.’ – Bonnie Raitt

‘I had a happy childhood.’ – Alastair Campbell

‘I don’t wish I started later, but I was never a child star. I was in school every year and had normal friends and I loved it and here I am, so I can’t say that I wish I hadn’t done it. I used to say, ‘No, I didn’t miss any of my childhood,’ but it is a very adult place to be, a movie set. Like, it’s a little weird.’ – Helen Hunt

‘When I write about my childhood I think, oh my God, how did I ever get from there to here? Not that any great thing has happened to me. But I felt so tiny, so lost.’ – Paul Theroux

‘I felt caged by my childhood.’ – Christina Aguilera

‘That boundless freedom of childhood is so wonderful.’ – Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark

‘I had a great childhood.’ – Miranda Lambert

‘From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe’s style and Egon Schiele’s framing – that’s what modelling is about.’ – Milla Jovovich

‘Baseball represents family. It represents my childhood.’ – Alyssa Milano

‘I spent a good deal of time going back over my childhood, my midlife, to try to understand who I was. We’re supposed to be complete and whole, and you can’t be whole if you’re trying to be perfect. Doing a life review helped me get over the disease to please.’ – Jane Fonda

‘There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.’ – Jasper Johns

‘Those who rhapsodize about the ease and joy of childhood have perhaps forgotten what it’s like to be 12 years old.’ – Joyce Maynard

‘Becoming a parent erased many of my negative childhood feelings and filled them in with something new.’ – Mariska Hargitay

‘My mom died when I was 16. I had a rough childhood, you know what I mean, but it made me strong.’ – Travis Barker

‘A lot of children can go back and look at their childhood and find reasons why it wasn’t perfect. But why whine about something no one can fix? You deal with it.’ – Junior Seau

‘At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.’ – Lewis Thomas

”Marnie’ was ahead of its time. People didn’t talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking.’ – Tippi Hedren

‘My childhood was extreme.’ – Tori Amos

‘I didn’t have a normal childhood by any means.’ – Tre Cool

‘It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland’s daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years – except they had little to do with being a child.’ – Liza Minnelli

‘My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.’ – Matt Damon

‘I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.’ – Beverly Cleary

‘My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.’ – Karl Lagerfeld

‘I had a great childhood.’ – Tom Felton

‘The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘Pretend was a big part of my childhood.’ – Jeff Bridges

‘Psychology doesn’t like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil.’ – Laura Schlessinger

‘People from the most horrendous of childhoods can have good lives, but it comes down to a very seemingly simple word. ‘Choice.” – Laura Schlessinger

‘I do not remember any proper children’s books in my childhood. I was not exposed to them.’ – Maurice Sendak

‘A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.’ – Ian Mcewan

‘I wanted to be a surgeon, possibly influenced by the qualities of our family doctor who cared for our childhood ailments.’ – Joseph Murray

‘When I was born here on one of the farms in Israel, my childhood, I never thought for one day that we will not be living together with Arabs.’ – Ariel Sharon

‘My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.’ – David Miliband

‘If I’m in the studio, I’m completely on music. I try to go to that place and that’s the toughest thing for me to do. When I’m with other musicians, sometimes I go back to, almost like, childhood, because that’s what I always wanted to be.’ – Jamie Foxx

‘When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was ‘realizing’ that music was ‘different’ from other things in life.’ – Jane Siberry

‘I am closer and closer to reaching my childhood dream. This is really exciting! I will continue to work hard, to focus on each tournament I play.’ – Yani Tseng

‘What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.’ – Andrew Lo

‘Recently, I’ve really responded to books that bring the magic of childhood back to us as adults.’ – Christina Ricci

‘I’d had a rough childhood.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘A lot of people do have tragic childhoods. But you know what? Get over it.’ – Phil McGraw

‘If I hadn’t had a childhood career, I probably would’ve signed a contract with the first person I came across.’ – Shania Twain

‘Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you’re labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.’ – Jon Ronson

‘The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn’t allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn’t let me take the characters seriously.’ – Garth Ennis

‘As a kid who wasn’t into sports, at school I felt almost alienated at times, whereas in the theatre community there was this amazing sense of camaraderie. Early on, we would go to rehearsals with my dad and I was like the mascot for the backstage crew. That was a big part of my childhood, so I dreamed of one day doing a play in London.’ – Zach Braff

‘I’d been shy since childhood, constantly full of self-doubt. And as an actor, I’d been so scared of failing that I made my career – and myself – a big joke.’ – Emily Mortimer

‘There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn’t talk at all.’ – Edward Hoagland

‘I was always a bit different. I had a very happy childhood, but I could never hang on to mates.’ – Gary Numan

‘So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.’ – George Saunders

‘I never had a true childhood.’ – Bethenny Frankel

‘The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It’s pretty shocking to me.’ – Jaron Lanier

‘Since childhood I’ve always had a tendency to lean towards melancholy. My sisters suffer from it too, so maybe it’s a genetic thing. But none of us has ever been on medication.’ – Natalie Imbruglia

‘I’m sure I had low-level scurvy all of my childhood.’ – Aisha Tyler

‘And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.’ – Aisha Tyler

‘My childhood was colorfully anarchic and punctuated by a lot of change.’ – Sadie Frost

‘I could see myself in some sort of pioneer bonnet, it’s my childhood fantasy, but I think I look too Jewish for the prairie.’ – Rachel Dratch

‘Being born and raised as a Californian, I somewhat ignorantly had taken for granted the diversity and liberal mindset that shaped my childhood and adult life.’ – Carre Otis

‘John Cusack and I have been friends since childhood, and the fact that we’re in so many films together is, no pun intended, serendipitous.’ – Jeremy Piven

‘My childhood was happy, joyful but very difficult.’ – Maria das Gracas Silva Foster

‘I lived in Complexo do Alemao until I was 12, dealt with domestic violence in my childhood and faced difficulties in life.’ – Maria das Gracas Silva Foster

‘I love my parents in the way most children would: for having been there at every point in my youth and childhood, ready to pick me up when I fell and support me when I stumbled.’ – Michael Gove

‘I had an amazing childhood.’ – Abbie Cornish

‘I had a very rough and tumultuous childhood.’ – Corey Feldman

‘I have nothing to say about my childhood. It was a perfectly pleasant upbringing – it’s not like it was unhappy or anything.’ – Graham Norton

‘I do tend to divide my childhood into darkness and light, and the first seven years were certainly the darkness.’ – Robert Carlyle

‘A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can’t balk at work like that. As an actor, that’s as good as it gets.’ – Robert Carlyle

‘I think because I’m not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.’ – Spike Jonze

‘As a parent, your perspective of childhood is through the eyes of this person that you care so much about and you just want the world to be great for them. You want their life to be easy and happy.’ – Spike Jonze

‘The happiest moments of my childhood were when my toys broke, because then I could destroy them with impunity.’ – Andrew Stanton

‘My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.’ – Peter Diamandis

‘I love my family and I had a very wonderful, magical childhood. But New Jersey was actually a very cold place. There was such an intense concentration of wealth, and such a low concentration of any actual human happiness.’ – Ezra Miller

‘There’s something about a roller coaster that triggers strong feelings, maybe because most of us associate them with childhood. They’re inherently cinematic; the very shape of a coaster, all hills and valleys and sickening helices, evokes a human emotional response.’ – Diablo Cody

‘They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you’re an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like – it influences how you’re going to end up.’ – Brett Ratner

‘Well, I had the most appalling childhood.’ – Bruce Robinson

‘I’ve been in love with the cinema since childhood and it’s a fantasy of mine to appear in a Hollywood movie.’ – Bruno Tonioli

‘You know, my childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word ‘turbulent.” – Michael K. Williams

‘Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood – all those things feel really true to me.’ – Jason Reitman

‘Growing up the son of a director has made me very aware of the various turns that a directing career can take. Sometimes your films turn out exactly as you want. Sometimes they don’t. I spent a lot of my childhood on sets. I think as a joke, my father gave me a line of dialogue in each of his films during the worst moments of my puberty.’ – Jason Reitman

‘I’m a big ‘Star Wars’ fan and grew up watching the movies. I read all the books and have read ‘Star Wars’ fiction that went between the newest trilogy and the original trilogy and it was part of my childhood.’ – Jared Padalecki

‘It’s natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.’ – Lev Grossman

‘Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.’ – Michael Ian Black

‘I don’t think I was awake for much of my childhood. I did a lot of napping. This might have been a defensive measure against encroaching depression. Until about the age of eleven or twelve, I had zero interests other than trying to steal gumballs from supermarket gumball machines.’ – Michael Ian Black

‘Comedy was why I got into acting the first place. Peter Sellers was a huge influence on my wanting to act. I grew up with him and found him hysterical. The Pink Panther films were an inspiration, from my earliest childhood days, when I was watching them with my brother and my dad.’ – Sally Hawkins

‘I don’t know if it’s that my own childhood felt brief, or I grew up too fast, or I was pushing myself too much at a young age, but I do feel like I am clinging to a certain childlike quality in myself, as a result of a childhood that was sometimes complicated.’ – Shawn Levy

‘I didn’t start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.’ – Julianna Baggott

‘Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.’ – Dana Spiotta

‘Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before – to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.’ – Jo Nesbo

‘The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.’ – David Mitchell

‘I had a happy childhood.’ – David Mitchell

‘My mom grew up in Kansas, my dad in Indiana. They had boring childhoods.’ – Hunter Parrish

‘My dad is Greek and my mum Jamaican. My grandparents brought me up for most of my childhood, but I saw my mum and dad all the time.’ – Lianne La Havas

‘My childhood was very colourful, and I am very good friends with both my parents. We have no secrets.’ – Rebecca Hall

‘I envy my daughter’s childhood.’ – Rene Russo

‘A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.’ – Tea Obreht

‘Well, I took ballet for many, many years, so my whole childhood really revolved around dance class. I grew up around dance; my mother was a dancer.’ – Amy Sherman-Palladino

‘My childhood was as conventional as you could get.’ – Lauren Groff

‘I do not have a family, per se. When I was younger, I grew up in foster care with my brother and sister. It was really a struggle, and knowing that there were people out there with tight-knit families really made my childhood an unfortunate one.’ – Victor Ortiz

‘I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.’ – Pat Conroy

‘Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn’t stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.’ – Jane Smiley

‘When I go back to the core of my childhood, my cousin Lucy seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise.’ – Martin Amis

‘When I was a little girl my parents always told me do everything you want in an artistic way. If you want to draw, make a drawing. Just do it. And if you want to play piano, play piano. It was a very free childhood where everything was possible.’ – Melanie Laurent

‘I’m really confident. I had a perfect childhood. I had perfect parents and grandparents. They just love me, simply. So I have no fears.’ – Melanie Laurent

‘We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs – it doesn’t really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It’s something that makes you feel – ‘I can do this stuff.” – Michael Morpurgo

‘Hitchcock’s got a very interesting voice; it’s a very controlled, measured rhythm that’s quite slow and, in that sense, also felt quite controlling in its pace. He retained something from his childhood, that London sound, as well as adopting some of the L.A. sounds… All of this helps you create the character.’ – Toby Jones

‘Pears are my favorite fruit! Reminds me of childhood.’ – Michelle Forbes

‘I just like food too much, and I don’t want to change. I spent so much of childhood trying to change, and I just got sick of it… I don’t want to look like Britney Spears, I just don’t want to. She’s hideous.’ – Beth Ditto

‘The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably we’d picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns.’ – Bharati Mukherjee

‘Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.’ – Robert Crais

‘My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn’t allowed to go.’ – Kate Atkinson

‘I had a lovely, feral, free childhood – out and then come back when you’re hungry or it gets too dark. I feel slightly cruel that I’m not offering my children the same.’ – Olivia Colman

‘The dueling maturity levels in high school is such a source of comedy to me. I was always such a late developer. I was last to walk. I was last to ride a bike. I was last to have sex. That’s why it’s fun to portray one side of your childhood onscreen.’ – Paul Feig

‘I have fond memories of my childhood. I spent five wonderful years on a popular TV show, but I didn’t have a normal childhood. I was tutored for grades 4-11.’ – Ricky Schroder

‘I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn’t.’ – Anthony Shadid

‘Childhood didn’t have a big influence on me, really – in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.’ – Simon Callow

‘All of my friends, I consider childhood friends because we met when I was probably 13, and I’m still friends with them today. It’s really nice that I have that core group.’ – Rachel Bilson

‘It’s hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you’re lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.’ – Ayelet Waldman

‘I certainly don’t think it’s inevitable that we don’t love children who don’t carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn’t have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it’s harder to love a child when you come into that child’s life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.’ – Ayelet Waldman

‘I had a lot of chaos in my very early years before I was old enough to know what was going on, and then I just skated through the rest of my childhood without dealing with it.’ – Jeremy Sisto

‘Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.’ – Whitley Strieber

‘Growing up in Poland, I didn’t have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don’t have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.’ – Abel Korzeniowski

‘My real name is Nils and Booboo is a childhood nickname. It’s not two words or two capital B’s, it’s B-o-o-b-o-o.’ – Booboo Stewart

‘My parents are good role models because they’ve worked hard and gave me a happy childhood.’ – Sophie Ellis-Bextor

‘Maybe I didn’t have the childhood people think you should have, but I still went through the ages; I was still a child.’ – Taylor Momsen

‘I was named after Yul Brynner because my mother had an infatuation with him. Who the hell names a Cuban kid Yul? Talk about a torturous childhood.’ – Yul Vazquez

‘I had an amazing childhood, lots of love. But my dad worked his tail off, getting up at 4 in the morning and going off at 5, 6 o’clock, yet he always had time to spend with his kids and his wife.’ – Criss Angel

‘A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous – more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown.’ – Jeffrey Kluger

‘Oh, I was brought up in the north of France, and I had a very enjoyable childhood with my family working as entrepreneur.’ – Bernard Arnault

‘I spent my childhood outdoors on my grandparents’ farm. I learned to ride a motorbike when I was about six, a little PeeWee 50. I’d climb trees – there was a big weeping willow.’ – Miranda Kerr

‘When you are at the bottom, you find beauty in such little things, and goodness in such little gestures. When I compare any struggle today to ones that I may have had in my childhood, there is nothing that can bring me down.’ – Natalia Vodianova

‘My childhood gave me resilience – and there’s little that can surprise me in life.’ – Natalia Vodianova

‘To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can’t compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.’ – Roman Abramovich

‘I used to have a theory actually that, if you’ve had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you’re going to make a lousy comedian.’ – David Steinberg

”Stand By Me’ was really great for me and my buddies; we’d all watch that together because that was us – we were down in the creek and hanging out every day and going on little adventures. I had about sixteen friends who are all about the same age as me and lived in a three-block radius. We spent our entire childhood down in that creek.’ – Scoot McNairy

‘I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I’m in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.’ – Juno Temple

‘I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you’re in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you’re in your zone.’ – Gilbert Hernandez

‘Dizzee’s just my childhood hero. He’s definitely the inspiration. He’s got himself to a very good place. He’s defied the expectations of what British black urban music was like. He was the first person who made the rest of Britain realise it wasn’t just a one-album-type situation. You’ve got to take your hat off to somebody like that.’ – Tinie Tempah

‘Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees.’ – Robert Winston

‘I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn’t form it into speech.’ – Richard Griffiths

‘I mean, there’s a sense wherein you skip a part of childhood, too, when you start working at that age I did; I was out working and out of home at 15, paying my own way in the world.’ – Ben Mendelsohn

‘You’re meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there’s a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.’ – Emma Donoghue

‘I had a very happy childhood.’ – Juan Antonio Bayona

‘My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.’ – Julian Fellowes

‘My first record was about childhood. There were a lot of nursery rhyme and fairytale references; it was all about being naive.’ – Mika

‘My childhood, I wouldn’t say it was bad. It helped me grow up. I stayed out of trouble. My parents taught me what’s wrong and right, and knowing that I had a little brother following me, I had to make sure I was doing the right thing so he knows what’s right, too. I was in the house nine days out of 10. There wasn’t nothing good outside for me.’ – Russell Westbrook

‘I can trace my environmentally-friendly lifestyle back to my childhood. My father was a conservative Republican that liked to ‘conserve’.’ – Ed Begley, Jr.

‘I had a great childhood, a very close-knit family. We were all overweight, and we had good times eating together, I imagine.’ – Stephen Furst

‘My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn’t know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people’s unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.’ – Hilary Mantel

‘A stable and nurturing childhood is essential for the healthy psycho-emotional and spiritual development of a human being. While we may understand what is supposed to happen to us physically, we must begin to better understand what happens to children mentally, emotionally and spiritually as a result of the families into which they are born.’ – Iyanla Vanzant

‘I knew all of the childhood prayers I uttered on my knees at the side of my bed. Many years of Sunday-school attendance had etched certain Psalms and rote prayers into the fibers of my brain. However, somewhere deep inside of me, I had the secret belief that I did not know how to pray, and that frightened me.’ – Iyanla Vanzant

‘I missed a lot of school for auditions, but other than that I had a very normal childhood.’ – Beau Mirchoff

‘People say, ‘Weren’t you deprived of your childhood?’ No way. I would not take anything back at all. Everything about it was great. I got to go places, meet people, play baseball against older kids and better competition. I had a great time.’ – Bryce Harper

‘I had a relatively tumultuous childhood.’ – Jesse Metcalfe

‘I grew up as a really sick kid; I had really bad childhood asthma and was at home all the time in New York.’ – Josh Peck

‘I didn’t have a good childhood growing up.’ – Julie Roberts

‘I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.’ – Alex Flinn

‘My very addictive personality and all sorts of strongholds are a thing of the past for me. Yet at the root of every single one of those issues was insecurity, something I had battled since childhood.’ – Beth Moore

‘Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with ‘Loony Tunes’), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte.’ – Ann-Marie MacDonald

‘When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather’s rationale.’ – Andrew O’Hagan

‘My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.’ – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

‘I would come, many years later, to understand why ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ is considered ‘an important novel’, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.’ – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

‘I don’t think I’ll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ – Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town – Lee’s was in the South, mine the Northwest – but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.’ – Chris Crutcher

‘My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child – one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.’ – Dorothy Allison

‘I loved every minute of my childhood – sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand… Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.’ – Jennifer Egan

‘Starting at age four, my mom decided that she was not going to have an idle child in the house. So I started taking dance lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then I was in acting classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and I was also modeling on Saturdays. And that was my childhood.’ – Chandra Wilson

‘Only one in five children in the U.S. lives within walking distance of a park. Many more lack access to a quality early childhood education that provides ample time and space to play.’ – Darell Hammond

‘Given that the biggest rise in childhood obesity rates are occurring in children ages 3 to 5 years, we must modify our efforts to place an emphasis on prevention versus intervention.’ – Darell Hammond

‘In neighborhoods without a usable park or playground, the incidence of childhood obesity increases by 29 percent.’ – Darell Hammond

‘Play is the best natural resource in a creative economy. Kids need more of it. It is the work of childhood. We hope to intrinsically change the opinion that play is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity for kids’ lives.’ – Darell Hammond

‘The Lord has been there from wanting to be a momma, to having a wonderful childhood life and dreaming of having a good motherhood as a child; always wanting to meet a good old country boy and having someone to love as much as I love my husband Roland and having a little boy that is a mixture of the both of us.’ – Ashton Shepherd

‘Theater is definitely something that, through the course of my childhood and even in college, I enjoyed participating in. I would love to do theater, or as far as movies or television goes, if the right thing came along I would definitely entertain it.’ – Jennifer Nettles

‘I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.’ – Ayad Akhtar

‘I have a painter’s memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.’ – Paula Fox

‘You know, as an only child, you’re kind of in a bubble, and there are all sorts of things about my childhood that I still can’t really place.’ – Penn Badgley

‘For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children’s fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.’ – David Nicholls

‘Actions, such as the designation of National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, spring from First Lady Michelle Obama’s leadership of efforts to end childhood obesity within this generation.’ – Richard Carmona

‘I don’t think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood; they might say there weren’t a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.’ – Jennifer Lynch

‘I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It’s what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do.’ – Khaled Hosseini

‘I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you’re 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.’ – Khaled Hosseini

‘I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I’d lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss.’ – Sharon Salzberg

‘Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.’ – Steven Johnson

‘Wonder knows that while you cannot look at the light, you cannot look at anything else without it. It is not exhausted by childhood, but finds its key there. It is a journey like a walk through the woods over the usual obstacles and around the common distractions while the voice of direction leads, saying, ‘This is the way, walk ye in it.” – Ravi Zacharias

‘To me, it feels like ‘The Doctor’ has to have a long coat, and that’s something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there’s something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn’t quite fit.’ – David Tennant

‘I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?’ – Rachel Kushner

‘My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.’ – Rachel Kushner

‘UC Merced is the University of California’s newest campus and lies among farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley, 2 1/2 hours east of San Francisco and not far from where I spent most of my childhood. It’s a part of California that has suffered deeply from the recession with high unemployment and a skyrocketing home foreclosure rate.’ – Lester Holt

‘When I perform on stage I become those male bullies, those dominators from my childhood. That’s probably why it’s so scary, because they scared me.’ – Grace Jones

‘There’s childhood and early onset bipolar, but it transitions in your early adulthood into something a little bit different, and extremely severe. It was at that time that my impulse control just went out the window. Impulse control when you’re manic just disappears.’ – Marya Hornbacher

‘I have never – I have never let go of my childhood contacts. My best friends from childhood are still my best friends.’ – Oscar Hijuelos

‘To me, you know, from my childhood I always had a fascination for United States.’ – Ravi Shankar

‘Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed – the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.’ – Thomas Keating

‘I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea.’ – Lucy Larcom

‘It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.’ – Lucy Larcom

‘Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.’ – Lucy Larcom

‘Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.’ – Will Self

‘I had what you could call a chaotic childhood. My parents divorced when I was 2; I went back and forth between my mom’s and dad’s houses for years.’ – Crystal Bowersox

‘I was always artistic – right from childhood – but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.’ – Sean Scully

‘I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.’ – Taiye Selasi

‘My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me.’ – Valorie Curry

‘I maybe missed money in my childhood, but I didn’t miss love, that’s for sure. My dad wasn’t there, but I can tell you not even once did I think I was missing something.’ – Olga Kurylenko

‘I believe in miracles. At the age of 13, I was on holiday in Moscow with my mother. It was the only trip I took in my whole childhood. We stepped off a metro train and were approached by a talent scout who told me that she wanted to sign me to her modeling agency.’ – Olga Kurylenko

‘Looking at acting, in the movies or the theater, and the way I like to look at it, it’s just an extension of childhood play… Kids play and imagine in a very intense fashion and they don’t need any director telling them, ‘You really have to believe in it.’ They believe in it completely.’ – Viggo Mortensen

‘I saw a lot of haute couture all my childhood, and without knowing it I’ve learned from when I was a child to recognise beautiful fabrics.’ – Ines de La Fressange

‘If a child plays sport early in childhood, and doesn’t give it up, he will play sport for the rest of his life. And if children have a connection with, and are involved in the preparation of, the food they eat, then it will be normal for them to cook these kind of meals, and they will go on cooking them for the rest of their lives.’ – Ferran Adria

‘My childhood definitely revolved around my relationship with my brother. I wanted to be different. I wanted to find my way of being as intriguing and interesting as he was.’ – Martha Wainwright

‘All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don’t do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn’t enough to make our lives have a meaning.’ – Yamamoto Tsunetomo

‘I spent all of my childhood at a performance art camp. Putting on plays, it was more like commedia dell’arte. It wasn’t career-oriented in any way. It was more fun and therapeutic, so I never really thought of it as something I would end up doing. I was more convinced I was going to be a painter.’ – Troy Garity

‘I’ve lived a fast-paced life, but I had the best childhood. I didn’t miss out on anything by having my daughter at a young age.’ – Keisha Castle-Hughes

‘One of the great things about music is that it has the capability of time travel – you smell a certain smell in the room and it takes you back to your childhood. I feel like music is able to do that, and it happens to me all the time.’ – M. Ward

‘I had a somewhat frenetic childhood because my mum and dad split up when I was five, and then my mum remarried.’ – Mark Ronson

‘The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother’s front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister’s farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen’s screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.’ – Andre Leon Talley

‘If I wasn’t doing candy, I’d want to create the best rescue animal-shelter organization. Otherwise, the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson were so much a part of my childhood, and Janet and I have become friends. So my second dream job would be backup singer for Janet Jackson!’ – Dylan Lauren

‘My childhood wasn’t very happy. It’s a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.’ – Stanley Donen

‘From early childhood, I was interested in understanding how the world worked, and assumed I would be some kind of physical scientist or chemist. But the truth was, I didn’t know there was another kind of world, the inner world, that was just as interesting, if not more relevant, than what was going on in the outside world.’ – Stephen LaBerge

‘When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a series published by Bobbs-Merrill called ‘The Childhood of Famous Americans.’ In it, historical figures like Clara Barton, Nancy Hanks, Elias Howe, Patrick Henry, and dozens more came to life for me as children.’ – Ann Hood

‘I am thrilled to write ‘The Treasure Chest,’ and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!’ – Ann Hood

‘Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I’d lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.’ – Ann Hood

‘In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers used to sit on chairs placed on a corn-bin to make music for the dance.’ – Lady Gregory

‘Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.’ – Lady Gregory

‘One of the reasons that I think I do love to write is because I did have a difficult childhood and not so great teenage years. It always helped me escape from my problems.’ – Meg Cabot

‘One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive ‘talking to’ was all I got.’ – Lincoln Steffens

‘Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.’ – Jesse Williams

‘I was a big baseball player, and my passion in life, in third grade, was collecting baseball cards. That was my childhood thing.’ – Alan Ritchson

‘There’s an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn’t something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don’t toe the line on abstract doctrine you can’t be part of the Church.’ – Garry Wills

‘My mum and dad are pretty amazing chefs and they spent most of my childhood cooking really extravagant things for my sister and me.’ – Jake Gyllenhaal

‘I grew up in Tuscany in a very poor family. My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.’ – Roberto Benigni

‘There’s something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.’ – Kazuo Ishiguro

‘One of the things I loved about my childhood was that I didn’t feel like I lost my innocence too young, like some children these days.’ – Danielle de Niese

‘I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book.’ – Devdutt Pattanaik

‘It’s very, very special for me. This is where I’ve grown up, it’s my home, and winning the Monaco Grand Prix is the highlight of any racing driver’s career and for me a childhood dream. It being my home makes it all the more special, unbelievable.’ – Nico Rosberg

‘My childhood taught me nothing… zero.’ – Lee Radziwill

‘The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.’ – Steven Pinker

‘For me, my awkward phase corresponded to an interest in rock n’ roll. From experience, I’m guessing an insecure childhood is probably quite a common thing among people who start a rock band.’ – The Edge

‘I grew up in the suburbs north of Atlanta. I had an amazing childhood, and I still go back to my home in Atlanta often.’ – Devon Werkheiser

‘My childhood had its challenges, like everyone’s. It imbued me with certain things and took away others. It made me very determined.’ – Sam Taylor-Johnson

‘My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It’s a place filled with sun, close to the beach.’ – Luca Parmitano

‘I had a very outdoorsy childhood. I was athletic and used to ride and do dressage. I could ride almost before I could walk. There is a picture of me at 18 months old sitting happily on the back of a donkey.’ – Alison Jackson

‘The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back – to be ‘taught’ – is disturbing.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.’ – Rachel Cusk

‘My childhood lacked affection and ambience.’ – Jacqueline de Ribes

‘I would never say I had a bad childhood at all.’ – Melissa Etheridge

‘I didn’t have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and… other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.’ – Mickey Rourke

‘Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that’s how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘I’m a comic nerd. I’m a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.’ – Anthony Bourdain

‘My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America.’ – Olivia Wilde

‘Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn’t actually done much about it until I came to London.’ – Tracy Chevalier

‘I lost my childhood. I didn’t play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.’ – Emmanuel Jal

‘I was the class podiatrist. I never made it to class clown. I wasn’t funny enough. I would examine feet and prescribe and ointment. It was a sad childhood.’ – Gilbert Gottfried

‘When you discover that you are going to have a child, it stirs up memories of your own childhood.’ – Kevin Nealon

‘An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.’ – Bayard Taylor

‘I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.’ – Ernest Cline

‘Superhero stories are kind of in my DNA from childhood on, so I think I’m genetically drawn to playing in the genre when the opportunity presents itself.’ – J. Michael Straczynski

‘People who grew up watching Disney films like myself, there are films that are certain benchmarks in my childhood. ‘The Little Mermaid’ was the first movie I remember seeing. ‘Beauty And The Beast,’ ‘Aladdin,’ those are three I remember right off the bat.’ – Mandy Moore

‘The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were ‘The Elephant Man,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and ‘Mad Max!’ Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.’ – Casey Affleck

‘When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I’ve really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.’ – Jim Woodring

‘I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who actually had a good childhood.’ – Seth MacFarlane

‘I really love the Olympics: Daley Thompson’s back-flip, Derek Redmond’s father helping him finish the 400m after his hamstring snapped at the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, Sir Steve Redgrave – childhood memories are flooded with these moments and idols.’ – Giles Duley

‘Almond Joys are a childhood favorite, but most of us could do without all those grams of sugar, especially when trying to instill healthy habits in our kids.’ – Homaro Cantu

‘One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce.’ – Jenna McCarthy

‘In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.’ – Jennifer Lee

‘I am obsessed with Chinese restaurants. Like many Americans, I first discovered them in my childhood.’ – Jennifer Lee

‘For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it’s the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe.’ – Krista Tippett

‘My childhood dream was to play basketball, actually.’ – Godfrey Gao

‘I don’t know why, but rain comes into my head the minute I think of my childhood.’ – Dhanush

‘I feel really lucky that I grew up pretending to be a spy for my whole childhood.’ – Daryl Sabara

‘Childhood has definitely been invented, hasn’t it? I think that’s because people had children later, and we appreciate and cherish childhood a lot more.’ – Helen McCrory

‘Oh, my father’s had a huge, immense impact on my career. I grew up on movie sets that he was working on, and it just become a part or was a part, was the only part of my life because I spent my whole childhood traveling and being on film sets.’ – Jake Busey

‘I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.’ – James Nesbitt

‘I didn’t have a normal childhood by any means. But it was what it was, and I appreciate what my parents did for me.’ – Tre Cool

‘The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.’ – Sonia Sotomayor

‘I was fortunate to have had a lively, happy childhood, but somewhere along the way I convinced myself I wasn’t wanted anywhere or by anyone if I wasn’t thin.’ – Lucy Davis

‘I had a very happy childhood, happy teenage years and I was famous by the time I was 22. A charmed life.’ – Rik Mayall

‘I was in my late thirties when my eyes were opened to truth in God’s Word that showed me I wasn’t living the abundant life Jesus died for me to have. I had a very negative mindset and was miserable most of the time because of the abuse I had experienced throughout my childhood.’ – Joyce Meyer

‘There was a time in my life that my mother told me that they didn’t know whether they were going to send me to college or an institution, and it’s rough to hear that… Childhood is tough.’ – Ellen Greene

‘I was quite shy when I was younger, but I’m not one of those people who can complain of a bad childhood or any trauma. There was none in my life. I had a wonderfully happy childhood.’ – Emilia Fox

‘Most of my good friends are my friends from high school or childhood, and they’re not actors – they have 9-to-5 jobs. But I’ve obviously, over time, developed friendships with actors. It’s two completely different worlds.’ – Emily Meade

‘I have great childhood memories cow-tipping, going off and getting lost in the bog for hours, and coming home covered in dirt.’ – Emily Ratajkowski

‘Spidey was the one comic I read consistently throughout my childhood. As someone who grew up a nerd, scrawny, and picked on in high school, I related very strongly to Peter Parker.’ – Josh Keaton

‘My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn’t really as colourful that.’ – Peter Capaldi

‘I come personally from a broken family, divorced very early in my childhood, a family with its own share of troubles, so I think that was very influential in both me believing that someday I would consistently devote myself to my own family that I created, but I think it also really affects my view of the world.’ – Bill de Blasio

‘At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That’s what I’m doing for my boys now.’ – Dwyane Wade

‘I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.’ – Joyce Meyer

‘I spent my childhood in Newfoundland and then my junior high and high school years in Alberta, Canada.’ – Sara Canning

‘As my children leave the protected parameters of the bay called childhood and enter the wavier seas of adolescence, I’m starting to get seasick.’ – Kristin Armstrong

‘I had an amazing childhood and always loved to sing and dance, but there were moments where I had ups and downs with my health that often tested me as it does many people. I’ve never hidden the fact that my health was sometimes not on my side, but I’ve never let it define me or deter me from my dreams.’ – Jessie J

‘My attitude goes back to my childhood. I used to audition for theatrical roles, and you can’t stand out in a room full of ambitious eight-year-old girls by acting the wallflower. I realised then that I couldn’t do things half-heartedly.’ – Jessie J

‘When I played Darth Maul, it sort of came from inside. I’m not saying it was natural, but I really enjoyed it, and I think I was tapping into my childhood, growing up with ‘Star Wars.’ And I grew up with G.I. Joe as well. Same as ‘Thundercats’ and ‘Transformers’ and ‘He-Man.’ And so I think it was the inner kid in me just came out.’ – Ray Park

‘I’m a big Batman fan; to be honest, to be a part of any superhero movie would really fulfill all of my childhood fantasies. If I could get beaten up by Batman, and just be part of the franchise, even getting kicked through a window would be great!’ – Ray Park

‘I try to shield my children as far as possible from the public glare. I want them to have a normal childhood like we had. We went to school by the school bus, had school food… There was no special treatment given to us. The same applies to my children as well.’ – Karisma Kapoor

‘I don’t have any friends from my childhood because I didn’t stay at one school for very long.’ – Katharine Isabelle

‘My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don’t relax because I don’t know how. I don’t want to know how. Life is too short to relax.’ – Susan Hayward

‘I love being outdoors and try to work out outside when I can. I spent most of my childhood outdoors.’ – Miranda Kerr

‘I have a lot of anger about my childhood – being hard of hearing and my relationship with my father.’ – Lou Ferrigno

‘Sci-fi and fantasy used to be a TV staple throughout my childhood. Then it just stopped dead. It was seen as culty, a minority interest.’ – Mark Gatiss

‘I think fractures in your childhood make you observe the world more as an outsider. Possibly it pushes you outside.’ – Pam Ferris

‘My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.’ – Romola Garai

‘I have an addictive personality. Boarding school merely sent me more quickly on the downward spiral that dominated my childhood.’ – Marcus Brigstocke

‘From childhood, I have been more of a musician than a singer. People close to me know how much effort I put into practising. Even when I am travelling, I have my tanpura on my iPhone.’ – Sonu Nigam

‘It was a unique childhood, to say the least. My father was born in Patiala to refugee parents and was a part of the Indian Air Force. The talented few amongst the Air Force pilots are made test pilots. Test pilots are best suited to look at the space programme as they are trained to expect the unexpected.’ – Kapil Sharma

‘The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.’ – Barbara Kingsolver

‘I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.’ – Margaret Atwood

‘I’m a lucky boy. Never wanted for anything; new tracksuit, new pair of football boots. I had a happy childhood.’ – Martin Compston

‘I try to update my arsenal constantly. Learning different martial arts since childhood. To understand what’s out there. To really be in tune.’ – Donnie Yen

‘I didn’t really grow up a comic book fanatic. I was a big baseball player, and my passion in life, in third grade, was collecting baseball cards. That was my childhood thing.’ – Alan Ritchson

‘My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my childhood.’ – Rani Mukerji

‘The most wonderful thing I hear is people coming up and saying ‘Thank you for my childhood’, which still blows my mind but is very sweet.’ – Daniel Radcliffe

‘I hated my whole childhood, hated it, hated it, hated it. There was no place for me.’ – Sandra Bullock

‘I spent my childhood eating. The only exercise I got was trying to twist off the cap of a jar of mayonnaise.’ – Richard Simmons

‘I don’t want you to think that I’m up late reading a stack of Spider-Man comics and eating a tray of lemon cookies while sucking my thumb. I’m not doing that. But I am loyal to the influences of my childhood.’ – Nicolas Cage

‘To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.’ – Umberto Eco

‘Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack in ‘Titanic’ was my childhood crush!’ – Christa B. Allen

‘I carry a disposable camera. It takes me back to my childhood, when you had to develop your film and wait to see what pictures you got.’ – Christa B. Allen

‘Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside.’ – Rachel Boston

‘Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn’t know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.’ – Colm Toibin

”400 Blows’ was so much like my own childhood, it really stunned me.’ – Arthur Penn