As a child I always wanted to be a singer. The music my mother played in the house moved me - Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Mahalia Jackson. It was truly spiritual. It made you understand what God was. We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life.
‐‐ Mary J. Blige
As a child, I always wanted to be the last one to take a bath because I knew I could close the door and spend hours just having my bath and singing.
‐‐ Euzhan Palcy
As a child, I always wanted to live on a boat.
‐‐ Jamie Wyeth
As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.
‐‐ Victoria Hanley
As a child, I certainly wanted to have hair that I could grow long and flip around. I no longer want that. My own hair that I have day to day is a fuzzy afro. And that's who I am.
‐‐ Sophie Okonedo
As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.
‐‐ Sigmar Polke
As a child, I copied Tenniel's illustrations from 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' obsessively, particularly his drawing of the white rabbit in waistcoat and frockcoat, umbrella tucked under one arm and a fob watch in paw, a look of suppressed panic in his eye.
‐‐ Chris Riddell
As a child, I could bike down the hill from my house and grab an ice-cold bottle of soda from the neighborhood grocer, which was nothing more than a corrugated metal shack run by two Indian men clad in sarongs.
‐‐ Kevin Kwan
As a child, I'd always liked cowboys and Indians stories where there were two layers - gruesome in the foreground but funny in the background.
‐‐ Anthony Browne
As a child I'd get given parts as a tree.
‐‐ Max Irons
As a child, I'd help my mum cook, and it was ridiculous - she had the correct gadget or utensil for everything. 'Stop! Don't use that, I have exactly the right utensil.' After I left home, I survived on cup-a-meals and never saw myself as being like her. Now I've become her.
‐‐ Kelis
As a child, I did what any normal kid who grew up without any electricity would do - I spent countless hours working on a computer wired to my parents' car battery... and learned how to code. This natural passion for computers lead me into the Internet market during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
‐‐ Ryan Holmes
As a child, I didn't know what I didn't have. I'm thankful for the challenges early on in my life because now I have a perspective on the world and kind of know what's important.
‐‐ America Ferrera
As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.'
‐‐ Emmanuel Jal
As a child, I didn't see my dad that much because he was always working at the restaurant. He became pretty jaded after working at the restaurant for so long.
‐‐ David Chang
As a child, I dreamed that my bed could fly and glide and swoop and hover high over the countryside near my home while, snug and secure, I looked down in wonder at the great carpet of life that seemed so perfect beneath me.
‐‐ Michael Leunig
As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages.
‐‐ Shawn Amos
As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.
‐‐ Naveen Jain
As a child, I felt that Hallowe'en was a time when creatures of the night suddenly came to life - we would turn off all the lights in the house and let flickering candlelight conjure up scary shadows and create the effect of imaginary figures lurking in dark corners.
‐‐ Pippa Middleton
As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.
‐‐ Jhumpa Lahiri
As a child, I first wanted to be a cook because my mother was such a good cook.
‐‐ Yves Rossy
As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.
‐‐ Paul Johnson
As a child, I got bored with my surroundings, so I would be another person for a little while.
‐‐ Elizabeth Debicki
As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.
‐‐ Joyce Carol Oates
As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.
‐‐ Peter Morgan
As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.
‐‐ Jacob Epstein
As a child, I had a teacher who told me, 'Look, Anne, one person can't make a difference.'
‐‐ Anne Wojcicki
As a child, I had always wanted to know what lay at the end of a corridor or behind a door in a picture, so I did a floorplan and elevations of Angelina's house and learned my way around it. The idea was that children should start to feel at home in it.
‐‐ Helen Craig
As a child, I had been told that I was exactly what a ballerina should be.
‐‐ Misty Copeland
As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.
‐‐ Erin Gray
As a child, I had lived many years in Southampton and sang in the choir of the Dune Church.
‐‐ Rachel Lambert Mellon
As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling.
‐‐ Arjun Rampal
As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.
‐‐ Lee Gutkind
As a child I had terrible asthma.
‐‐ Martin Scorsese
As a child, I had the opportunity to meet the captain onboard a British Airways flight. It was so exciting to see the cockpit and controls. I was in awe of the captain, and he stamped my log book, which I still have to this day.
‐‐ Orlando Bloom
As a child, I had to get up early for school or work. I'd get ready by myself. I'd set my alarm to wake me up very early in the morning, and be off to work, the family driver driving me every morning. I did it alone, my parents never coming in to wake me up.
‐‐ Janet Jackson
As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.
‐‐ Michael Leunig
As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.
‐‐ V. S. Naipaul
As a child, I lived in Germany at the Ramstein air force base, where my dad sang at a nightclub in Kaiserslautern. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so when I was, like, ten or 11, I would go with them to the bar until two in the morning.
‐‐ James Mercer
As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.
‐‐ Donna Brazile
As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents' empathy - they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around.
‐‐ James D. Watson
As a child, I loved being onstage. I loved singing, I loved the lights, I loved the adrenaline. I even loved learning lines. I was completely obsessive.
‐‐ Emma Watson
As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.
‐‐ Gail Carson Levine
As a child I loved ghost stories.
‐‐ Rebecca Hall
As a child, I loved story books and wanted to be in them so desperately and live the stories.
‐‐ Talulah Riley
As a child I prayed that my calling be revealed - but not with expectation and not with a destination. I became an artist because I didn't know what to do and I thought it was really fun to make things.
‐‐ Kiki Smith
As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
‐‐ John Burnside
As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'
‐‐ Mohsin Hamid
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
‐‐ Norman Spinrad
As a child I really didn't like men at all, in fact.
‐‐ Natalia Vodianova