Quotes About Innocence

I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

When I was a kid, I would make these incredibly bloody movies in my back yard. I was constantly making weird blood concoctions; Jell-O and milk was a good one. I was constantly ruining clothes and staining my parents' walls and stuff.

Sometimes I think I am still that 5-year-old girl playing with her dogs in the yard. That's how I see myself.

There was a lot of playing by myself, wearing last year's Halloween costume and wandering around the yard talking to myself - which may account for my fondness for doing different voices.

The children of the 1980s were the last before a lot of things changed. We were the last generation not to have cell phones, not to have video games, not to have parents who worried if we strayed from the yard.

I must have been six or seven - standing in front of a full-length mirror with a yardstick, pretending to be John Lennon. In my head, I was always going to be a singer, and The Beatles were probably the first musicians that had a major impact.

I burned down my backyard as a seven-year-old. I poured kerosene over dried leaves and set the whole place on fire, just for fun. Yeah, not a very normal thing to do.

The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of wonder. They have curiosity. 'Who, what, where, why, when, and how!' They never stop asking questions, and I never stop asking questions, just like a five year old.

People often yearn back to more innocent times, but more and more, as I get older, I find myself hankering after more jaded days.

Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.

I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that. Don't rush into adulthood, it isn't all that much fun.

I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.

I often felt like that Mr. Magoo figure in the cartoon, who just wanders through traffic, and somehow it never hits him. I kind of feel that way about my whole childhood: Why do I have a normal life?

As kids, we played on the streets without shoes, and the game didn't stop for oncoming traffic.

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.

I was 10 years old, taking the train by myself to see Saturday matinees, something you'd never let a kid do now. I got very hooked on it.

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.

There's little kids on trains coming up to me, singing my theme song, and they can barely walk.

An honest man is always a child.

To P.J. (2 yrs old who sed write a poem for me in Portland, Oregon) if i cud ever write a poem as beautiful as u little 2/yr/old/brotha, I wud laugh, jump, leap up and touch the stars cuz u be the poem i try for each time i pick up a pen and paper. u. and Morani and Mungu be our blue/blk/stars that will shine on our lives and makes us finally BE. if i cud ever write a poem as beautiful as u, little 2/yr/old/brotha, poetry wud go out of bizness.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television.

I saw no need to upset the apple cart at work by pointing out that "He's my friend's son" is neither proof of innocence nor a viable defence.

It is not a pleasant thing, to be accused of something one has not done. One ought to be able to brush the untruths aside, but somehow they take hold of the mind and cause a spectral form of guilt--like a ghost in the head, or in the conscience! Someone is certain that you have done this terrible thing, and so you start to feel as if you have, even though you know you have not. I begin to understand, Georges, why people confess to crimes of which they are innocent.