The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.
I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.
In my childhood, I used to go to theatres to watch independent singers' outing on screen. I used to be excited about how different they sound in a video and at a theatre.
I overcame a lot of obstacles in my life and in my childhood.
A chef's palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.
I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.
Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.
Pears are my favorite fruit! Reminds me of childhood.
I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers.
I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation's oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood, she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite.
We were the outliers: my mother was the only Western woman (khawagayya, in Egyptian Arabic) to have married into the family, and during my childhood, we were the only members living outside of Egypt. So between my father's prestige as the eldest son and my own exotic pedigree, I basked in the spotlight.
As an actress, you're perpetually about to be unemployed. That fear - when you have two parents who worked 9-to-5 jobs and went through periods of being unemployed - is real. Those were not welcome times in my childhood.
Denial of childhood and denial of freedom are the biggest sins which humankind has been committing and perpetuating for ages.
Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.
Comedy was why I got into acting the first place. Peter Sellers was a huge influence on my wanting to act. I grew up with him and found him hysterical. The Pink Panther films were an inspiration, from my earliest childhood days, when I was watching them with my brother and my dad.
Since childhood, I was always told that I am petite and can get hurt easily. And I always felt the need to become physically strong, just to prove people wrong.
It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.
I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.
The most common characteristic of childhood building toys is that they snap together in one way or another. Technology is constantly shifting, and we should make sure that whatever we build is interoperable and pliable.
