Janet Echelman Quotes

It was magical growing up in New Jersey. My sister and I would go nuts in the basement and do full theater productions. We used a humidifier as a fog machine. It was over the top.

I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

Me and my two brothers painted a football pitch and used the net from scaffolding for goals with bits of wood, although they were burnt down in the end.

When I was little, I put on plays for my family at Sunday dinner, and I would direct them and have all my cousins, my brother, and my best friends in it. I was a very imaginative and theatrical child and wasn't afraid of being in front of a camera. It was like make-believe to me.

I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!

When I was a little, little kid, my family got a new washing machine, and they had a big box that was left over. So I cut a big hole in the box, and I made it like a giant TV set. I brought it into the living room, and I did the news and the weather for my family.

When I was a kid, we had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment.

Imagination and invention go hand in hand. Remember how lack of resources was never a problem in childhood games? Shift a few pieces of furniture around the living room, and you have yourself a fort.

One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil' 'D' Duran Duran. We didn't make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.

I was very physical as a child - we lived on a smallholding, and I was always outside making mud pies or building structures up trees.

As a kid, I liked building a lot of Legos and built houses and did some fun stuff with that.

I was always taking garbage from around the house and making my own toys. I wasn't given a Wii or an Xbox or anything.

I'd take garbage, and I'd glue them together and create inventions.

When I was about 7 years old, I built a leprechaun trap out of a cardboard box, a biscuit tin and some toilet paper tubes.

We learned a verse of this and that and we were having fun with the songs. Tommy would make up stories to go along with them and I would yell at him, 'Hey, stupid, that's not right,' and he was like a silly kid trying to impress.

In all honesty, I didn't love reading when I was a kid. I'd rather be running around in the woods or doing my best to scare the pants off all the children in the neighborhood by pretending my house was haunted or making them play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.

My first children's book, 'Tickle Monster,' was inspired by tickling my son one evening.

I credit my mom with inspiring in me a love of design, matched by her creative problem-solving abilities. This is a woman who could find an old, discarded piece of furniture, bring it home and turn it into something fabulous.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

If a leaf fell from a tree, I'd stop juggling and play with the leaf. I went to my prop bag and got a little bandage and stuck the leaf back on the tree. People loved it.

When I was a child, I was always nicking my mum's jewellery to wear, and I loved to drape a massive Chinese shawl around me from our fancy-dress box. I was obsessed with a feather and rabbit-fur collar from the age of three and attempted to make one with my friend, whose father was a gamekeeper.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.

My mom would be leaving the house and she'd say, 'Don't you pull out all of the old dresses in the attic and put on a show again!' And the door would close, and that's exactly what I'd do. The show was calling me!

I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.