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.

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

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

Not many people know this about me, but I’m a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I’m basically a natural blonde.

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

I used to make little movies when I was younger. I’d make my friends be in them and then edit them.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

When I was a kid, there were no credit cards. Instead, retailers offered layaway plans. My mom would go to a store, such as a furniture outlet, choose the sofa she wanted, and put it on layaway. That meant she put a little money down to hold the sofa, and every payday she’d pay a little toward the purchase.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

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.

We travel often to Asia, Africa, Europe, where they were born.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn’t care about suffering. I always did.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

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.

If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I’d hear a loud ‚A-hem!‘ from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.

When I was five – it’s not even bad – I stole a sweet from the sweet shop.

The thing that’s made me open my eyes to what was happening to the environment and climate was films and documentaries.

I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It’s on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.

I knew by heart all the dialogue of James Dean’s films; I could watch Rebel Without a Cause a hundred times over.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

I’ve seen a look in dogs‘ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

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

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

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.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

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.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.

My father gave me some advice when I was very young – whatever someone tells you in the future, don’t forget Pele is the best.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

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.

The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.

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.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

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

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

I was born in Earl K. Long Hospital. I was born Feb. 5th, 1986. I have a lot of family members. My grandmother had five girls, and all of them had children. It was always a house full. A lot of cousins. A lot of family members.

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

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

I’ve done films where we don’t rehearse, and I’ve done films where we heavily rehearse. I like rehearsals.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season.

I remember as a little girl going down to the beet fields in the Dakotas and in Nebraska and Wyoming as migrant workers when I was very, very small, like, I was, like, 5 years old, I believe. And I remember going out there, you know, traveling to these states and living in these little tarpaper shacks that they had in Wyoming.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.