Quotes About Childhood

I used play Gonggi Nori, which is played with 5 small stones. It is so fun to play!

Growing up in Hitchin was comfortable and easy enough. My parents had some great records - and some not-so-great ones - and that's where I got introduced to Motown and the Stones and Springsteen.

My house was full of music. My main memories are of the record player at home: it was all Beatles and Rolling Stones, and we danced around the living room; that started me off on instruments, and I've done nothing else ever since.

As a child, I was rather active for my age. Sensing something special about me, my father told me that I had the vision to accomplish great things in life. He always encouraged me to do what I wanted to do - and this has stood me in good stead.

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

I grew up loving Broadway musicals. I'd put on my parents' cast albums and stand on the stool and sing in the mirror.

My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the same group.

It was great growing up in Brooklyn. The neighborhood was the street. Everybody would get together after school. Somebody would sit out on a stoop and then five other people, 10 other people would come out - a game of stickball or stoopball or dodgeball - all revolved around a basketball or dodgeball. We had fun.

When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.

I have a picture of me sitting on the step of a brownstone stoop with my mom and all the Muppets around us. And Perry Como, for some reason.

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

I've never stopped loving cartoons. I loved cartoons as a kid. I can still look at them and enjoy them.

I stopped going to school in the middle of fourth grade. Everyone grows up with the peer pressure, and kids being mean to each other in school. I think that's such a horrible thing, but I never really dealt with it in a high school way.

Hand any four-year-old a fist full of crayons, and it is a very, very few who don't get busy with them, drawing, coloring, scribbling. I have not stopped scribbling.

I had an imaginary friend. I don't know when I stopped having an imaginary friend, but my mom and everybody in my family remembers it pretty good. It's definitely true.

When I say 'homeschooled,' I was homeschooled for, like, two years, and then we just stopped. It was me and my parents, and they'd give me homework and stuff like that, but then one day, they just stopped.

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn't able to, though I wanted to... There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it 'writer's block.' For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don't usually know them.

When we were growing up, all of us kids were vegetarians. No one had asked me to stop eating meat - I just noticed everyone else around me had stopped, so I followed the crew.

When I was six years old, my parents told me that we were moving back home to Armenia. I didn't really understand what was happening. My father had stopped playing football, and he was at home all the time.

My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.

One of the first memories I have, we went to - actually, we stopped in New York for a little bit, and I remember going to Macy's with my mom. And I was a big fan of the color orange, and they had Snoopy orange gloves, hat and scarves. And I bought it, and it was the best thing ever. I loved America right there. That was it.

It's a daily miracle to see a child grow and develop all the senses and language and speech and faculties, and they're so much fun and they're so delightful and they're so innocent. It just stops your heart every time; I can't get enough of it.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out. Hard to know where you start and the next person stops. Even as an adult, that's a hard thing to know. As a kid, it can be really confusing, because it's all new and you're trying to sort of make your map.