Julie Burchill Quotes

Most original viewers of the Mickey Mouse Club didn't face the crush of family and social problems children have today.

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.

I wasn't into sports when I was younger. I was one of those kids who always tried to get a note from the doctor to say I had a cold so I didn't have to go play hockey in bad weather and be miserable.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

It's natural for a child to assume that his or her own childhood is unremarkable.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

It's very hard to be objective about something you're in, especially when you set it up against things that you experienced as a child.

A baseball manager has learned a lot about his job from having played the game, but a parent has not learned a thing from having once been a child.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

You should really try to live your childhood when you’re a child, because if you do it when you’re 26, it can be dangerous.

I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys.

Of course I had the parallel of having the early years of my life being spent during apartheid, and then having a lot of awful poverty going on around me while I lived in this bubble of middle-classness, but I was a child, and I only really started to (I hope) understand all of that fairly recently.

You will say that everyone has seen landscapes and figures from childhood on. The question is: Has everybody also been reflexive as a child? Has everybody who has seen them also loved heath, fields, meadows, woods, and the snow and the rain and the s.

I was not happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I think it's more difficult writing what it's like to be a child. You can pretend you know what it's like, but you don't really know. The only parts I can remember is that the adults were like, "Aren't they cute?" But when you're little you're looking at the other kids like they're your colleagues. They're not like, "Oh, we're all cute little kids." They're more like your office acquaintances. It's very hard to grasp the memories of what it actually was like to be a kid.

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn't help me at all.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

It would be very sad if children had no memories before those of school. What they need most is the love and attention of their mother.

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

I never lived the life of 'Oh, you're so good-looking'. People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl-maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long in a bowl cut. I was in a coffee shop once and the waitress was like, 'What do you want, Miss?' I was 10 or 11-the worst age to have that happen. I had a jean jacket on and a Metallica pin. I thought I was really cool.