First published in 1984 when I was nothing more than sticks of bone at seven, 'Dragons of Autumn Twilight' began what would be one of the icons of my grunge-stained disenchanted childhood.
My mother's childhood was complex, disjointed, and disturbing. As children, we would gather round and ask her to tell us again and again The Story of Her Childhood. It was Grimmsian, Andersenesque: a classic fairy tale replete with goodies and baddies.
When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.
Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.
From childhood to adolescence, girls face mixed messages about displaying power and authority.
It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.
During our childhood, my sister and I had no birthday parties. We would take a packet of sweets to school and distribute it to our class-mates. That was it. We were not allowed to go to parties, either.
That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
My childhood, I wouldn't say it was bad. It helped me grow up. I stayed out of trouble. My parents taught me what's wrong and right, and knowing that I had a little brother following me, I had to make sure I was doing the right thing so he knows what's right, too. I was in the house nine days out of 10. There wasn't nothing good outside for me.
To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself a child.
The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
Most of the female 'superhero' role models of my childhood came from novels, and they rarely had powers. Take Dorothy, for example, from 'The Wizard of Oz;' or Laura Ingalls and her sisters in the 'Little House on the Prairie' novels.
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
Families fighting childhood cancer should not have to worry about where they're going to get the next dose of the drug they need to save their child's life.
Not a great deal is known about the factors in childhood that doubtless underlie a person's choice of career - I'm talking now about a career to which one is passionately committed, in contradistinction to a career chosen merely as a means of earning a living.
It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.
One of the central memories of my childhood is of hunting - not well; I am a terrible shot - quail and dove and grouse on a farm on the Tennessee River.
Downstairs in my house, I have a museum room. I keep all of my awards down there, and childhood photos, and even all the clothes I've worn on tour, in videos and on album covers.
My Twitter is a joke toilet, and I filter all these old, cringe-y parts of my brother and my childhood through that in an attempt to flush it down the drain forever.
