Caroll Spinney Quotes

I paid for my name a lot when I was growing up because other kids teased me.

I had a nickname in junior high, and I'm loathe to say this: 'potato lady.'

I was not very strong growing up, and my uncle used to look at me, like, 'This kid is not growing up, he is growing tall but he can be broken like a banana.' The banana in Congo is called 'Dikembe.' So my uncle start calling me, 'Dikembe, Dikembe, look at you Dikembe, you cannot even stand up.' It took a long time for me to walk.

I had a beautiful mother and a famous father, and I didn't know where I fit in.

I grew up really kind of mixed up. I lived with my white grandparents and mom and got made fun of a lot because I talked like her.

There were boys in my class who would stick pencils in my curls, and say 'oh it's like a cushion' and laugh at me. Even my body type was very different from the other girls in my school. So I grew up thinking that I don't look good enough.

I was always brutally teased for being George Harrison's son. That was from the age of about four or five, before I even knew who he was. And for seven years people would follow me about school singing 'Yellow Submarine.' I still can't listen to that song to this day.

Being bullied is something I experienced in school, and it is not fun.

Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.

As a child, I was tortured because my mother was a brilliant seamstress who made most of my clothes. I was despised by the children at school because I looked like I was going to an opening every day. We weren't wealthy at all; we lived in a row house in Philadelphia.

I know plenty of Hollywood kids who still struggle with being whole. Their lives are never fully their own - always in the grip of a parent who put celebrity ahead of them.

A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle.

By high school, I was already tall - 5-foot-8 - and one day I made the mistake of wearing green tights. The football players all started calling me the Jolly Green Giant.

I remember feeling all right with myself until age 13. Then, I was getting off the bus one day and this guy called me Miss Piggy. That was the first time I ever really felt like I wasn't okay.

Growing up, I had a ton of friends, and I had a great life, but people still made fun of me sometimes.

For some reason, people look at me and laugh. I don't know why.

I made sure that instead of people making fun of me, like every comedian probably says, I made fun of myself first so they would get distracted and just laugh. I was pretty brutally picked on for a while growing up. It was always the really pretty girls, the hot girls and then there was me. So I had to do something to get any sort of attention.

Dummy Dum Dum was my nickname for years at school. I was the strange one of the family, the one who couldn't remember his name.

I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn't fit in anywhere.

I came over when I was 10 years old, which was very difficult because everybody made fun of me.

Everybody either wanted to take care of me or push me around, you know? I was teased a lot, sure I was, of course. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, everybody was taking their spurts except me. I was not growing up.

When I was young, I was teased mercilessly by my classmates for being a redhead. I wasn't particularly well coordinated either, which made me a bit of a liability in P.E.

Sarfati. That's my real last name. I don't use it a lot because I got 'Lea So-fatty,' 'Lea So-farty' at school.

When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it.

I went to elementary school in L.A. I was born in L.A. My mother was from Redondo Beach. My father was French. He died six months before I was born, so my mother went home. I was born there. Not the childhood that most people think. Middle-class, raised by my mother. Single mom.