Every Christmas now for years I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

Growing up with the childhood that I had I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

Concepts like individuals have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

I had the pleasure as Robin said to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity.

Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

There is no correlation between a childhood success and a professional athlete.

I feel lucky because I was a nerd which I talk about in the book but I had academic success so through that because that's what my parents put a great deal of value on I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.

They say everything you go through in your childhood builds character and inner strength.

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present in the smile of God I return to my childhood too for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

My childhood I would say was a bit sad. Society resents that.

My childhood I would say was a bit sad.

My relationship with 'Pollyanna' is a very personal one because Pollyanna got me through my childhood.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig which my mother took me to see.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

When I look back on my childhood I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer but my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood because it was full of gladness and good humanity.

I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected momentary and fleeting yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.

My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

I had the standard movie geek childhood because for as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was make movies.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very very involved and interested in art and particularly in animated movies.

My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath ' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening and going once a day to beg for food.