I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos I'm in fancy dress playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas play with language solve problems use my imagination and draw on my own childhood.

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home from my childhood are still with me.

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!

When you finally go back to your old home you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

The rise of childhood obesity has placed the health of an entire generation at risk.

For me however that beloved glowing little word happiness has become associated with everything I have felt since childhood upon hearing the sound of the word itself.

I love my family and I had a very wonderful magical childhood. But New Jersey was actually a very cold place. There was such an intense concentration of wealth and such a low concentration of any actual human happiness.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again from zero.

Chocolate is the first luxury. It has so many things wrapped up in it: Deliciusness in the moment childhood memories and that grin-inducing feeling of getting a reward for being good.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

Not even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.

At this early stage in our evolution now through our infancy and into our childhood and then with luck our growing up what our species needs most of all right now is simply a future.

Comedy was the key to everything. I grew up fast and controlled my future by bringing it on faster than it naturally unfolded. I cheated myself out of a childhood but then got a running headstart into adulthood that no one else could keep up with.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood who were funny without swearing were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

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

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies and I had played a little at school and at camp. My parents would drag me out to perform for my family like all parents do but it was a hobby - nothing more.

Selfishness narcissism being uncomfortable in your own skin not feeling connected to the world around you feeling dislocated from family and youth having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

From very early on in my childhood - four five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny and I didn't look like anybody else I didn't even look like any member of my family.

I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart such as I have felt it since my childhood.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful it's tough it's buried in our mythic childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.