Michael Lee-Chin Quotes

I was always taking garbage from around the house and making my own toys. I wasn't given a Wii or an Xbox or anything.

My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.

I like crafts that come out of poverty or necessity. There used to be hobby shops where you'd get your supplies, and then you'd use your imagination.

As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

I see potential in everything. It's about opening your mind to what you can do to the garment: because they're cheap, you can cut them or stitch them, and if you stuff it up, it's fine - it's only two dollars.

I needed a capo - a clamp to hold down the strings - so my daddy made me one out of a corn on the cob and a rubber band.

As kids, we were used to playing football with anything that we managed to kick and whenever we got a ball, it was a bonus.

My dad used to give me old electrical equipment that didn't work anymore, and I'd put things together. I think that's why I like to mix things that don't belong.

My first toy was an adjustable wrench I called 'my wrencher.'

Me and my two brothers painted a football pitch and used the net from scaffolding for goals with bits of wood, although they were burnt down in the end.

I'd take garbage, and I'd glue them together and create inventions.

Our idea of fun wasn't going to Disney World. It was, you want to play basketball, go outside, and make a goal. You want to play baseball? Take the old broom, take the handle off, take a tennis ball that we found somewhere, and go play baseball. We were forced to create things.

When I was about 7 years old, I built a leprechaun trap out of a cardboard box, a biscuit tin and some toilet paper tubes.

I built a fort when I was little, with pillows and blankets.

Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

'Ever seen a leaf - a leaf from a tree?' 'Yes.' I saw one recently - a yellow one, a little green, wilted at the edges. Blown by the wind. When I was a little boy, I used to shut my eyes in winter and imagine a green leaf, with veins on it, and the sun shining ...' 'What's this - an allegory?' "No; why? Not an allegory - a leaf, just a leaf. A leaf is good. Everything's good.'

I was playing with sound like I would have played with pots and pans as a kid.

You've got to keep the child alive; you can't create without it.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

I find children inspiring. The way they look at the world. The magical world they live in, to me, is inspiring.

Wasn't it beautiful when you believed in everything?

Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.

What is more simple than to tell to a little boy, 'This is not the truth, it is a game?'

The ability to play pretend is something that everyone has access to; you see little kids doing it.

See the world as if for the first time; see it through the eyes of a child, and you will suddenly find that you are free.