Maurice Sendak never - I remember he said something that was very striking because it's something I never thought about. I always loved his work, and he said, 'I don't really view myself as a children's book author. I just try and write about childhood as honestly as I can.'
If I could give a shout-out to anything in the childhood world, I have to say 'Daniel Tiger.' I want to write a love letter to everyone on that staff. It is so perfectly, thoughtfully, lovingly done. And as a parent, it is the one thing out of everything that we dip in to that really helps.
My childhood, I would say, was a bit sad.
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F - it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
I lost my childhood. I didn't play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
The Premier League is not my goal but a childhood dream. It is a dream that could be fulfilled.
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.
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.
An awful lot of people have childhood memories of holidays in Cornwall, and the holidays are old-fashioned and hugely successful. You stick a child and a dog on one of the beaches, and they just light up; they just love it.
Nobody became an actor because he had a good childhood.
It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.
I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one.
I have two little children. I didn't want to be missing their childhood while I was away, busy writing about children.
Honestly, my entire childhood could be summed up with one word: Reader. I was always hunched over a book; in fact, I was the only kid in the world who got paler in the summer, because I'd sneak down into our cool, dank cellar and sit alone with a book for hours.
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.
I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
When my friends talk about childhood, I've never heard of any cartoons or TV they remember. The only thing we share is Michael Jackson. That's how far his music travelled - to a remote village on the other side of the world.
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.
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.
Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.
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.
I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape.
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.
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.
I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in 'Heap House.'
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.'
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
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.
Music was a central part of my childhood because my mother played organ and piano in the church, and that meant all us kids had to be in the church choir.
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.
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.
