Wyatt Cenac Quotes

I had a suit made for me when I was five. It was double-breasted, mohair and purple. My mother was very particular about clothing - it always used to have to go back into the plastic and it used to drive me insane.

I used to love watching 'Hee Haw' on TV when I was a kid. My brothers and sisters weren't happy about it, but I just loved the music.

When I was 10, I had dyed red hair, and I used to paint my nails - I think my mum secretly loved it.

I do remember when I was little - I had to have been no more than 6 - I redid my room. I talked my mom into taking me to a store, and I got, like, all coordinating blue, green, and yellow colors, and the theme was dinosaurs.

I always drank chocolate milk growing up and I remember my grandmother would always have it when I would visit her in the Dominican Republic - that's when it all started.

I'm afraid in my family we still laugh now about the fact that I was called 'stubborn' and my brother was called 'determined.'

Growing up, I didn't just watch 'The Cosby Show.' I watched 'Growing Pains' and 'Family Ties,' too.

My grandmother really inspires me. I lived with her until halfway through middle school, since both my parents worked a lot.

I have been brought up in an environment which was quite an exciting childhood.

I'm a kid from Kansas, so J.C. Penney was where I got all my clothes from kindergarten to around 7th grade.

The children in 'Nobody Knows' had a resonance with me. The children are projections of myself.

My embarrassing confession is that my father is a 'Camelot: The Musical' obsessive. So as a child, when we were going to visit relatives on the weekend, whenever we were driving back on these three-hour drives, he would be playing the musical soundtrack on repeat, on the cassette in our car, to the extent that we begged him never to play it again.

Being a child growing up in the 80s, my mum experimented with dressing me in quite a lot of day-glo.

What I continuously remember is when I was a child in the courtyard with my grandmother and we milked the goat and we made the ricotta. The still-warm ricotta from our goat, on top of a piece of bread, and we used to sprinkle just a little bit of honey or sugar on it. That flavor, that stays in my memory.

I'd listen to the radio, especially when my parents were out on house calls to pray for people - you know, shut-ins. Sometimes, if we were incredibly sneaky, we could do it at night when everyone was asleep.

If you put a camera on the wall, you would laugh at some of the fights me and my brothers had.

As a toddler, my favorite piece of clothing was my Oshkosh denim overalls that I would call my Oreos because I could never say Oshkosh. I was literally obsessed with them and wanted to wear them every single day.

I spent every day of third grade wearing a glittery purple cowboy hat.

Interestingly, when I look at pictures of me when I was five or six years old, I think I look pretty stylish.

I remember my grandmother taking me and my sisters to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. We would watch the diving bell and see the diving horse jump into the pool. We would take the bus there, and I just smile thinking about all of us running around the pier on those days.

I had very big lips growing up, so my brother started to call me Scooter Fish because he decided a scooter fish has big lips.

My background with acting is deeply interwoven with my family life and my childhood. It's a 'Peter Pan'-like narrative, something that was golden but could also be a bit dubious.

When I saw the scene in 'Close Encounters,' and Richard Dreyfuss's son is screaming at him - that's a heartbreaking scene. And I remember being devastated by 'E.T.' Or when E.T. started to get sick. That broke me up a little bit.

One of the secrets of 'A Christmas Story' is that it's a relatable story. They feel like our family.

But my parents picked Ft. Wayne, which was the best decision because if they had brought me to New York or Philly, I would have swam back to Trinidad!