I’ll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.

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

Temptation is just the feeling that you’re the most independent person on planet Earth. That you know everything. That’s something that we all go through as a kid. Now, this lifestyle that I’m in, the same thing exists! But it’s 10 times worse, because everything is at my disposal. When you’re in the limelight, you can get anything you want.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

‚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.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

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

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

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

I didn’t play with other children.

The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

I’ve always been very happy. I’ve always been easy going and I’ve always been very encouraging; it’s just my personality.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

I’m not a serious person, and I don’t like serious people.

Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I’m quite shy.

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’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was 8.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

You have a nice personality, but not for a human being.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

Public behavior is merely private character writ large.

When I was a kid, I never thought much about football. I thought about following in my family’s footsteps and going into professional wrestling.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.

I never played with anything like toys.

I think Pat Robertson is a terrific fellow.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

In the real world, children love me.

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.

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.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

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

I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

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.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

But ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I’ve never been interested in that.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

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

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy, I guess.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.