Quotes About Childhood

I'm a Chicago Cubs fan. I grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, and attended my first game at Wrigley Field when I was four.

Before I found out you couldn't get bitten by a radioactive spider and shoot webs out of your wrist, I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up - until I was, like, 8.

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

I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.

Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.

I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

I was always meant to be a writer. I've felt that way since I was a child.

My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music.

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.

I think that most of the children's writers live in the world that they've created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children's writers are the children.

When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.

I spent as much time watching telly and films when I was a kid as I did lying around reading books. I think it's crazy that writers are only allowed to say that certain books have influenced them.

I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.

As is said about most writers, on the one hand, all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

I really love MFK Fisher's food writing, and obviously Anthony Bourdain's food writing is exceptional, in particular 'A Cook's Tour'. I really love the short story that he writes about revisiting the coastal town in France of his childhood and the memories that he has of his father.

When you're little, every experience writes on the canvas of who you are.

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

I tried writing a song and it wasn't very good. I sung it to my mom and she told me it was bad - but I was eight, so it's okay.