Sol Campbell Quotes

I'm a very creative person, but that side of me was suppressed because I was academic. I was depressed at school, and I didn't know why.

As a child I was not allowed to express my feelings, so I had to go back through therapy and express the child's pain.

I wasn't happy at all as a child. I was very privileged and knew extraordinary people, but I felt very lonely: my mother thought I was extremely difficult and my grandmother was extremely severe.

I always had to mask my emotions. I could never show that I missed my mom or my dad, especially when they moved to America. My grandparents were tough. I was not allowed to receive letters that had not been read before. Everything was controlled - everything!

Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.

In Cameroon, kids have many problems. They think everything is lost before they are born. It seems like they are not allowed to dream. They are not allowed to be ambitious. They just accept being the victim of their life.

Those heartaches, those cries in your life that you go through, I thought that every kid goes through them. I knew I didn't have much, but I didn't know there was another side out there. I thought one present for Christmas was the way it is.

When I was growing up, I think I was expected to be seen and not heard. You're this little, nerdy kid; no one wants to hear about how sad you are. Nobody wants to hear that you feel lonely.

I felt like that growing up - that I didn't have a voice.

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.

I always hated being a child. I always felt like an adult trapped in a child's body.

There was probably something as a child I wanted to express, something unsaid that I needed to share.

I don't think I was a monstrous child. I don't think I was ever allowed to be.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.

I think what's wrong with too many people is they're too reserved. They're miserable, but they don't want to talk about it.

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

I was just a very torn child, very wounded in so many areas, with no family support. I happened to the be the fifth child of my family. So everybody was already grown and had left home already.

I'm not nostalgic for my glory days in college. It was lame for me. Probably because I had no friends.

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

I vividly remember sixth grade. It's the year when kids turn mean, and it's definitely no longer okay to cry in public. So we force our hot tears back, and they burn our throats all the way down.

I got bullied a lot when I was a kid, and because of that I thought for the most part that I didn't really have a childhood - I had to grow up so quick and there was no real enjoyment in that for me.

When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

I was told so many times when I was a kid, 'I can't be friends with you, you're too intense, you're too sad all the time.' I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren't my friends would become my friends.

It was a stifling society with government controlling all aspects of life. You could not get funding for any sort of project. There was no infrastructure to support you. And there were a lot of social pressures to just take a government job and have some babies, and that’s it.