From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

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

When I was little… I didn’t relate to princesses. I saw Maleficent, and I just thought she was so – she was so elegant.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

I can’t remember what made my dad take us karting for the first time, I can’t remember really. I was into motorsport by then and I knew everything, and every driver, it was around 2009, 2008. That’s when I first properly knew about Formula One. Those were the days.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

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

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.

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.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.

Where I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‚I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.‘ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

I was probably tall as a child, but I just stopped growing.

My father will anticipate everything. He will leave you and me no chance to do a great and brilliant deed.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‚Mad Men‘ episode.

‚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.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.