Quotes About Childhood

You can't go wrong with pirates. I mean, they're pirates. It's what everyone wants to be when they're a kid. Ninja, assassin, or a pirate - and now you can kind of be all three.

I have been interested in pirates since I was about 8 years old. The idea of people deciding, sometimes at a moment's notice, to throw over the rules and restrictions of society - it was just irresistible.

When I say I saw shotguns and pistols in the house, I saw them. It was what I grew up around.

My dad was down the pit and my mother worked in a newsagent.

We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

When I was three years old, one of the first albums I ever heard was Michael Jackson's 'Off the Wall.'

My mom had early rap records, like Jimmy Spicer. In the middle of the records was a turntable and a receiver - I used to scratch records on it - and on top was a reel-to-reel. In front of that wall were more stacks of records. It was either Mom's record or Pop's record, and they had their names on each and every one.

There was an old acoustic in the house that my mother had given me for my fifth birthday. I took it off the wall and started jamming. I was seven years old at the time.

I was actually born in the front bedroom while my dad sat on the wall outside, feeling sick. Twenty minutes after my mother gave birth, she went downstairs and made my old man a cup of tea.

In the garden of our house, when I was three. My brothers and I had a jumping wall. I remember it as enormously high, but it was probably only about a foot and a half.

I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, 'God, they don't paint behind the sets.' It's a bit of a shame, really - 'Oh, what's on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.' I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.

I grew up in a commissioned house in the next suburb over, Mount Abbot. It was a two-bedroom house with me, my brother, and my two sisters. Mum and Dad slept in the lounge, and we didn't have wallpaper.

My childhood bedroom had wallpaper that was printed with clouds and rainbows.

Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn't go round to another boy's house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom.

I worked in my parents' decorating store from six. My mum would get me in every Saturday polishing the paint and straightening the wallpaper for 50p.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.

My father worked in Chrysler's drafting department and used to bring home tracing paper, No. 2 pencils, and masking tape from the office. With these, I used to trace off drawings from the 'Superman' and 'Batman' comics and put them up on my bedroom walls.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

I was born and spent my first five years in Chester, an ancient city that retains some of its Roman walls and fortifications and contains a great medieval cathedral, as well as Tudor, Stuart and early 19th century architecture. Visiting these things was free, and my parents - who had little money - made the most of this.

My brother was an avid Stoke City fan and a good footballer. We shared a room, growing up, and the walls were covered with 1970s Stoke players, like Peter Shilton, Gordon Banks, and Jimmy Greenhoff.

Growing up, my height was faithfully tracked from infancy to my late teens on the door frame of my mom's office - the only place in my family's home in Toronto where writing on the walls was encouraged.

I guess I figured out my dad was a fight coordinator pretty early, because I always saw him running into walls and stuff and nobody got mad at him, but it took me a lot longer to figure out what Mom did, because it was usually stuff on the telephone.

As a child, I was hyper, I was a clown and I was sensitive. Today I'm all of the above, except I've refrained from bouncing off the walls.