When I was little, I used to adore gold. It was something special.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

When I was a little boy in school I had to dress up as a bunny and there’s a picture of me with an annoyed face, and when I saw it, I thought I should name myself ‚Bad Bunny.‘

I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a musician.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.

I always wanted to do what my brothers were doing. I always wanted to play the games they played and play rough and wear pants and go outside.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

I know that a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is about the most random place for a country singer to come from, but I had an awesome childhood.

If I have cash and I can’t figure a way to put it into real estate or my business, I hold it in gold and silver.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

To gather with God’s people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.

When I was a child I thought I saw an angel. It had wings and kinda looked like my sister. I opened the door so some light could come into the room, and it sort of faded away. My mother said it was probably my Guardian Angel.

I didn’t play soccer; I played that other football in grade school through college.

I did stand-up for my grandparents every day when I was, like, eight.

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

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.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

I look at other people’s lives, and some people feel like they’re too old to play with toys. But I still go through the toy section at the store, ‚cause there were toys that I wanted when I was little that I couldn’t have. So I still get them.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration.

If you have faith in our leaders of commerce, don’t buy gold. If you do not have faith in them, maybe you should buy gold or silver.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called ‚Fingers Crossed,‘ which is on SoundCloud.

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

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I’ve always been a tennis fan.

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.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

I said I would never wear my gold again because it would be insensitive and disrespectful to all the people who died and lost everything in Katrina.

We wanted to step off our island and add the color of the third world. We got gold cigarette paper and stuck it around our teeth. We really did look like pirates and dressed to look the part.

I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

Gold was a gift to Jesus. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

I still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii.

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother’s kitchen. If I don’t have time to cook, I’ll just read a cookbook.

I think it speaks of all women having those few special things that make them feel feminine. And so when I was a little girl, I would associate Guerlain with that.

I’m just a little kid from Akron.

When I was maybe eight or nine years old, I first learned about the climate crisis in school. My teachers taught me about it and we saw films and pictures of plastic in the ocean and extreme weather events. Those pictures were just stuck in my head; I thought, there is no point in anything.

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn’t any consistency.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.