Quotes on Kid

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.

I got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.

Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn't anything going on the outside!

When I was a kid, I took 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Partridge Family' very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.

Growing up in New Orleans, I was always the only black kid, or one of two, on the school soccer team. While I was always conscious of this status, what took precedent was my unfettered love of the game.

If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'

I was always a happy kid. I'd play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It's a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?

I remember being a kid and praying in the hell of my house to have somebody love me and somebody that I could love.

Making a movie where the central character is a horse was a challenge. Because I'm scared of riding. I was thrown as a kid. One of my daughters is a competitive jumper, we live with horses, we have stables on our property. But I don't ride. I observe, and I worry.

I hope that somewhere in Small Town, U.S.A., a 15-year-old kid looks to me as a role model the way I looked at the Indigo Girls and Elton John as role models.

I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

If one less kid can grow up without hiding who they are along the way or having to believe that who they love is something that will make them lonely, then everything I went through will be worth it.

I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.

I don't remember as a kid wanting to do or be anything else but drive something, be a race driver.