Rodney Crowell Quotes

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

A certain point came when I wanted to document growing-up adventures.

I very much want to write about some elements of my own growing up.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

We hung out on the streets, played stickball, and did all of the things that other kids did.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

I told my whole life story in my book.

I want to write about my experiences since 'Speedbumps.'

My memoir is a story of family and childhood, and everyone has had one of those. Mine is not the definitive version of childhood, but it's a great way to start a conversation.

If 'Queen Of Denmark' was about my childhood, then 'Pale Green Ghosts' is definitely about my adolescence, and that period was completely dominated by electronic music.

I always wanted to make a coming-of-age film, or something about growing up, like 'The Wonder Years,' 'Stand By Me' or 'Diner.'

When you first start off, I know singers who have only been in the business just a short amount of time, and they've already written their autobiography. I didn't want to write it too soon. I wanted to live a while and write about things that I felt were important to me - growing up in Wales, and the characters that I met and listened to.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

I get a little myopic in the act of doing any writing. I think I'm not as interested or not as able to write about balance, because I think there's something I want to try to get at. I'm trying to get at something about the experience of growing up or about families.

I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

It's always a really great feeling when I talk to people who watched 'Jett Jackson' because we were the same age. We were all kids. I was 13 when I started working on that show, and that was part of my childhood.

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

'Superbad' was such a personal movie.

I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I've got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives.

I was 13 and at summer camp when I had my first kiss.