James Acaster Quotes

It was, you know, probably 80 degrees out in L.A., and my dad took me outside and there was snow. At the time, I thought, 'Every kid doesn't have snow in their backyard on Christmas?'

When I was a little boy, I didn't know what the Hall of Fame was. I was just playing the game of baseball, and I wanted to be just like my dad.

My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.

Most young people haven't used their storytelling skills since they were 8 or 9 or 10 and wanted to persuade Mom and Dad to take them to the ball game.

Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers.

I never picked up a guitar as a kid, partly because my dad didn't want the noise in our little back-to-back in Sheffield.

I used to sing when I was six years old. When the family would leave the house, I'd get up on the stool and sing. 'T for Texas, T for Tenessee, T for Thelma, the gal that made a wreck out of me.' I was in love with my babysitter. She was 18. I was six.

I had my own little quirks as a child.

With my mom and dad around, I became a child yet again.

My mum says I never had tantrums. I had elongated and very complicated tea parties in my cot, and I was sort of talking, I guess, quite young, and I would say, 'Oh, how lovely to see you, do come in!' I'd have these theatrical tea parties by myself with my imaginary friends.

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.

There was one moment where they were riding their little ponies in Scotland, and Stella said to me: 'Dad! You're Paul McCartney, aren't you?' 'Yes darling, but I'm Daddy really'.

Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

I think I have a finely tuned sense of humor. I think just being around it and growing up in it... my dad and Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. These are the people I grew up around.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

Between my mom and dad, I would hear a lot of Earth, Wind, and Fire. My mom loved Chaka Khan, so that was on in the car a lot.

Childhood candor... shall I ever find you again?

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.

My earliest musical memory was getting to watch my dad play drums in a local band. He's a banker by trade, but a drummer at heart. I remember seeing the guitar player do the solo from "Werewolves of London" with his teeth, and that was the moment that had me hooked.

When I was little the sky was closer.