From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.
Growing up, music was an important part of my childhood. I see it being just as important in my children and all children's growth and development, and in a parent's connection with their children.
One improvement I have learned from my childhood experience with my father: I do not threaten punishment in the morning. That was awful. Late into the night I would lie awake tossing and wondering what he was going to do to me. Usually he did nothing. A quiet, impressive 'talking to' was all I got.
To me, it feels like 'The Doctor' has to have a long coat, and that's something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there's something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn't quite fit.
One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.
What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy.
When I think of my childhood, I see my mother, the complete sixties parent, decked in purple frappe silk caftans, the acidic smell of newly stripped pine mingling with incense.
My childhood ended in 1942. I was 12, and for the next three years, I lived under incessant bombings. It was a life of constant fear.
In neighborhoods without a usable park or playground, the incidence of childhood obesity increases by 29 percent.
My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
To be perfectly honest with you, having a mother as an actress - who I watched struggle tremendously during my childhood - and to watch fluctuations of ups and downs is difficult. She did mainly television, so I think I associated that with a life of inconsistency. As I've come into my own, I realize it has nothing to do with the medium.
I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
I was named after Yul Brynner because my mother had an infatuation with him. Who the hell names a Cuban kid Yul? Talk about a torturous childhood.
In childhood I developed a serious throat infection, and my heart stopped beating. I recovered from that illness with a voice that boomed forth like Kate Smith's!
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.
New vaccines are being developed all the time, which could save many more lives and dramatically improve people's health. And this goes beyond the traditional burden of childhood infectious diseases.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
What was a very private childhood hobby turned into a very a public, professional job, and I think that there's a lot of inhibition that can grow from that.
