I was born partially deaf and suffered from labyrinthitis, which affected my balance. I had numerous ear infections and spent my childhood in and out of hospital having operations.
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.
I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism.
Timmy Horan was a childhood hero. He was a great distributor, elusive, good stepper, very physical, defensively very sound. What a rounded player.
My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.
Why do we feel jealousy? Therapists often regard the demon as a scar of childhood trauma or a symptom of a psychological problem. And it's true that people who feel inadequate, insecure, or overly dependent tend to be more jealous than others.
Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.
The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.
As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.
Actions, such as the designation of National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, spring from First Lady Michelle Obama's leadership of efforts to end childhood obesity within this generation.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.
I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes.
Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It's less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.
I was having a dilemma whether I wanted to return to acting at all because I was coming from this sort of agency-less childhood career, and I'd never made the choice to go into acting.
I grew up in India. From my childhood, I remember the great reverence that people held for our national hero, Mahatma Gandhi. He galvanized millions to march as one, disarmed the empire that had ruled his country for nearly a century, and enabled India to become a free and independent nation.
When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.
Vaccinations absolutely work, and have dramatically decreased rates of childhood diseases.
