Erma Bombeck Quotes

I think that's the problem with kids now. Everything is manufactured. And then they're sitting there watching the television, where all the work is done for them. Radio made me use my imagination.

I love kids; I think they are fun and funny.

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?

Maybe that is why kids like Dumbledore: because he is funny rather than a miserable old sod with a long white beard.

Although technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, it has also ensured the erosion of imagination.

Children are smarter than any of us. Know how I know that? I don't know one child with a full time job and children.

When I was growing up, kids would go outside and play all day and invent things. And my brothers and I pretended our picnic table was a ship one summer. Our bikes were horses, and our trees were forts. We turned everything in the world into make-believe.

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind.

As a kid, I was just led out in the morning to go spend my day with my friends and just run in the woods. And I'd only come home to eat or when I was thirsty.

Kids are funny.

I had a wild imagination as a kid - wild! - and I was outside all the time, swinging around in trees by myself.

Mom would say, 'Get out of the house,' and we would just go. We had all sorts of large swings and flying foxes and various death traps throughout the forest that we'd try and do our best to hurt ourselves on. It was a great childhood in terms of being creative, I think.

I developed a knack for storytelling early on around the kitchen table with my family. I just happen to be a funny guy.

When I was growing up, there wasn't too much technology. There weren't so many channels that we were glued to on TV. We had to go outside and create our games. Kids had the habit of being active and exercising, just enjoying the fresh air.

Children are funny.

My imagination works well because I didn't have a boob tube for a baby-sitter.

I tell ya when I was a kid, all I knew was rejection. My yo-yo, it never came back.

The only trouble with this world today lies in our lack of understanding of the power of imagination.

My parents would tell us to go outside and play or to do creative stuff, but television was very limited. So we used our own creativity to entertain ourselves. We were out in the woods a lot making huts and playing horses.

In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.

And I’m not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better we must do better. There are far worse things to drop on people than crayolas.

I'm a dirty kid, I like to be outside, I like to run about, I like to get messy. So I spent a lot of time outside as a kid, skating and just being a disaster.

If we nourish imagination, we nourish everything else.

When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend and I used to think that he went everywhere with me, and that I could talk to him and that he could hear me, and that he could grant me wishes and stuff. And then I grew up, and I stopped going to church.