Quotes About Childhood

I was not the most attractive child. I had two really big buck teeth. I was horrendous - long, lanky and gangly.

You don't become a Republican until you lose all your baby teeth and fall down a lot and get the croup and then become angry and bitter.

I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.

There are several peculiarities that I share with children which, like having no front teeth, are perhaps more acceptable in the very young, but which, for better or worse, seem to be a part of my makeup.

I remember after the second episode of 'Saturday Night Takeaway' aired, there were thousands of comments about how bad my teeth were. That got to me most because I was so insecure about my teeth as a child.

I don't think its better to grow up normal and get the measles and mumps and have your front teeth knocked out.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

Mum worked in telecommunications and Dad was a mechanic.

Telephone operators have called me 'sir' since I was 6.

The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.

I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.

'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age.

Mostly, I was only interested in television as a kid, and the majority of reading material I collected was an adjunct to that central concern, comic books and magazines included.

One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way.

I joke that I learned the essentials of storytelling from Hanna-Barbera, but I pretty much did. That kind of television is what enamored me as a kid, and that's what really got me hooked. You could say that's where it all began.

I wasn't aware of my dad being an actor when I was young. I remember there was an Australian children's entertainer on television called Ralph Harris and when I'd say my father was an actor, kids would say, you know, 'oh, is he Ralph Harris?' And I had to say no and then they would lose interest.

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics... No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.

When I was little, I would always try and look into the television screen along the sides. I kept thinking if you looked in there, you could see what was happening off camera.

I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on.

I have this image in my head of me in the house I grew up in, and hearing this incredible music on the television show, going over to it, and there's Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert, and Annie Ross. It knocked me out of my socks, and I'm still in flight.

One of my early memories is of a white girl twirling in a circle. I realized later on that it was from that show 'Small Wonder' - the oldest I could have been when I was watching it was four or five, but it's one I think about a lot. It's stuck in my head, this terrible Fox television show.

When I was nine, I found a copy of 'Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series' in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.

I used to watch those syndicated, black-and-white Country Music Television shows from the '60s with my dad. And all of those people that played on our television set, they just felt like family to me. And I believed in my heart, as a little kid, that I would be doing that someday and I would know all those people and we would be friends.

I loved Garry Marshall. The television shows he created in the '80s were the most deeply important entertainment of my childhood.