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 used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

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

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.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

My children love Maleficent’s voice, so they always make me do it at home.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‚how‘ and ‚why‘ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I had been one.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

From the time I was a kid, I always knew something was going to happen to me. Didn’t know exactly what.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

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

I don’t do research. I never have.

I mean, I went to a Catholic boys‘ school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.

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

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

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.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

I was of the generation where most of the Disney princesses and female characters were not girls that I admired. They just weren’t characters I looked up to and identified with.

I didn’t read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

When I was growing up, I wasn’t an extrovert. If anything, I was an introverted kid and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

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.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

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.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

I’ve had everything pierced at some point.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

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.

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.

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

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

I wasn’t allowed to go to movies when I was kid; my father was a minister. 101 Dalmatians and King of Kings, that was the extent of it.

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

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.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

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.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

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

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.

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 know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

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

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

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

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

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

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

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

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

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.