My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

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.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

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.

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.

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

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

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‚I want to get out and become like him‘. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

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

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

My life is mine to remember.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‚feeling‘ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

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

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

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

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.

‚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 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.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

I listen to my old records and I think, ‚How did I ever get on the radio?‘

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

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’m German in my mind, but from a Germany that doesn’t exist any more.

When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, auditioning for Broadway was my dream.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

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

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.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Time is bunk.

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.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

Time itself comes in drops.

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.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

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

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

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

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

Taxpayers have long memories, especially when it comes to how their hard-earned money is spent.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

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 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.

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.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

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.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.