My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

The old Dodgers were something special, but of my teammates overall, there was nobody like Pee Wee Reese for me.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

There’s nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

I wasn’t a kid growing up thinking, ‚One day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech.‘ That wasn’t on my mind.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

I never listen to ‚Nevermind.‘ I haven’t listened to it since we put it out. That says something.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

I have this old ’57 Porsche Speedster, and the way the door closes, I’ll just sit there and listen to the sound of the latch going, ‚cluh-CLICK-click.‘ That door! I live for that door. Whatever the opposite of planned obsolescence is, that’s what I’m into.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

I was called ‚Dumbo,‘ like the elephant, as a child because I couldn’t understand things at school.

I just want to go through Central Park and watch folks passing by. Spend the whole day watching people. I miss that.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

I like today and perhaps a little future still, but the past is really something I’m not interested in. So, as far as I’m concerned, I like only the past of things and people I don’t know. When I know, I don’t care because I knew how it was.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, ‚Don’t get comfortable, because we may not be here long.‘

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn’t very good-looking. But in his own way he’d always save the day.

Sonnymoon and Quadrants are a couple of bands that really inspire me in terms of the melodics of things and certain tones and just what feels good. It takes me back to the type of music that I grew up on in my household. We played a lot of gangsta rap, but we also played a lot of oldies, and I think that mix is part of what inspires my sound.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.

The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.