Childhood Quotes

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.

I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document. I just enjoyed using the stuff. It was sort of lying around, and I got to play with it. I had an older brother who was interested in it as well. So I think I had kind of a unique environment, that most people didn't have, because my dad was willing to spend all his available income on buying a computer or whatever.

I belong to a family of boys who were raised in meager circumstances in central Kansas, and every one of us earned our way as we went along, and it never occurred to us that we were poor, but we were.

When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and... we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly housework in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty - in a way - was the first inspiration in my life.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

It was at "Little Lodge" I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as 'the Governess' was announced.

My mother made a brilliant impression upon my childhood life. She shone for me like the evening star.

I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.

Because as an only child, you have your own little world.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.

I was an adult when I was supposed to be a kid. So now I'm an adult and I'm acting like a kid.

I never had, like, a nanny that took care of me. My mom always fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Back to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.

That background helped me a lot, because it taught me to fend for myself from a very early age, and to be responsible. It was an upheaval of an upbringing, which seems to have worked, I guess.

My parents were very strict. They thought boarding school would do me good. So, when I was about seven, I was put in one in India for a while.

I had a spate of being run over between the ages of 11 and 13. I was quite a rambunctious child, I had a little moped I used to ride illegally. I got hit by cars three times because I was a very day-dreamy kid.

I grew up in Denton, east Manchester, and was raised by my late father, Reg, a barber.

My dad knew I was mad about music. While he worked as a barber he would hear songs on the radio and we'd have endless discussions about them. So I got my first record player when I was 11 years old.