T. S. Eliot Quotes

The landscape you grow up in speaks to you in a way that nowhere else does.

We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

When I was younger, my view of New York was really wide-eyed and excited. I've lived here all my life.

That reminds me of something that happened to me when I was a kid.

I was actually born in New York. We lived there until I was three so I grew up watching Sesame Street and hearing the accent. You are a sponge at that age, soaking everything up.

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.

So something about that touched me, obviously, when I was young and it just stayed with me. I'm always amazed by that, because my experience seems to be so much different than what I'm told, so much of the time.

There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.

I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures.

I remember seeing this picture my mother had of Dick Clark. It didn't inspire me to be an actor or anything, but when I did 'American Dreams' with Dick Clark, my mother came out, and she showed him this picture of them that was taken 35 years earlier. It was great.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

They say your childhood influences your tastes and interests, or your approach if you're an artist. So what you create, whatever you saw, whatever your childhood was like - it influences how you're going to end up.

'House' was such a special part of my life.

I was born in Philadelphia, and I've tried to escape that city all my life. I end up writing plays that force me back to Philadelphia, at least psychologically if not physically.

I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.

I recently spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield, England, which is where I'm from. I wouldn't move back there, but it's funny when you spend a bit of time in the place where you were brought up. You kind of realize how that place has had quite a big effect on you or made you a certain way.

I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.

I lived in New York for seven years, although I was always in denial about it. Even though I had an apartment there, I always pretended I was just visiting. I do love New York. But I'm a Londoner at heart.

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

London's where I grew up and had most of my experiences.

Everybody kind of feels something for where they grew up, where they came from.

I loved growing up in Shaker Heights, and I really miss it.

I'll always be a small-town boy from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.