Simon Hoggart Quotes

You can't have a bad time at Disney World. It's not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson.

Disneyland is Vegas for children.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Disneyland really began when my two daughters were very young. Saturday was always Daddy's Day and I would take them to the merry-go-round, and sit on a bench eating peanuts while they rode. And sitting there alone, I felt there should be something built, some kind of family park where parents and children could have fun together.

I was the oldest child, and both my parents worked, so I had a great deal of responsibility from a very young age.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.

I was an ugly child. I got lost on the beach. I asked a cop if he could find my parents. He said, 'I don't know. There's lots of places for them to hide'.

I would watch 'Wizard of Oz,' like every day, when I was two. I had a hard time understanding that I couldn't go into the film, because it felt so real to me.

Often the only thing a child can remember about an adult in later years, when he or she is grown, is whether or not that person was kind to him or her.

I'm very musically inclined. My parents were opera singers. As a young child, I could hear operas and I knew if they were sad, or if they reminded me of something, or they brought back a memory.

When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.

Peter was not with them for the moment, and they felt rather lonely up there by themselves. He could go so much faster than they that he would suddenly shoot out of sight, to have some adventure in which they had no share. He would come down laughing over something fearfully funny he had been saying to a star, but he had already forgotten what it was, or he would come up with mermaid scales still sticking to him, and yet not be able to to say for certain what had been happening. It was really rather irritating to children who had never seen a mermaid.

Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America...

Just go to Disneyland. You have the impact of how the Americans think, how they dream, what they desire, how they have a good time, what they prefer. I associate this with young people. But many times I think this infantile quality is much better than the false, incomplete concept of adulthood.

Children never lie...I remember my daughter standing in her crib the first time I gave her caviar. I put it on bread. She ate it and said, "Encore, Papa."

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

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.

To have a child is the greatest honor and responsibility that can be bestowed upon any living being. - Arya

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.

For children, most importantly, being in the garden is something magical.

I had a fan who had a fictional relationship with me. She wrote letters to me and then wrote return letters to herself (from me). In her mind, we were married and had two children. Her parents finally uncovered this delusional life she was living and she got help.

No one can remember himself as an unpleasant child.

Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn't.

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.