Peter Ustinov Quotes

My neighborhood was like 'The Wonder Years.' We played until 10 o'clock at night. We used to tell scary stories. I was the one scaring them. We used to play football by this place called the Myer's House. It was a big, spooky house with the gables; we'd hang out there and scare each other.

I absolutely believed when I was young because the Tooth Fairy was always good to me. The Tooth Fairy generally left me a dollar or two dollars and, as a kid, that was a lot of money.

In all honesty, I didn't love reading when I was a kid. I'd rather be running around in the woods or doing my best to scare the pants off all the children in the neighborhood by pretending my house was haunted or making them play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.

I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild.

I had a book that was given to me as a kid that was called 'Faeries.' It was this dark, sinister book with pictures that used to scare me because they were these creepy little creatures. But, I was always really drawn to that fantasy world, more than a sci-fi world, in terms of outer space stuff.

When I was at primary school, we had this theory that if you ate an egg, it meant you'd get pregnant and give birth to a chicken or another egg. It was something we dared together. I avoided eggs for years, but now they're my favourite food.

I grew up believing my sister was from the planet Neptune and had been sent down to Earth to kill me. I believed this because my sister Emily convinced me of it when I was a toddler. I think she'd seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and her imagination ran away with her. There's a part of me that still believes it.

I had dreams of conehead aliens when I was little. Before 'Saturday Night Live' did it. And then they came out with them, and I went on to be a glorified extra in the movie. When everyone else was laughing, I was scared.

As a kid, I really, truly believed that if you swallowed a watermelon seed, something really bad was going to happen.

I think that most of the monsters I dream of, I dreamt of as a child.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

When I was four I thought everything in TV was just TV, then I was five and Ma unlied about lots of it being pictures of real and Outside being totally real. Now I’m in Outside but it turns out lots of it isn’t real at all.

The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.

Well I'm a 5 year old at heart; I still think that there is a monster under my bed - and I'm not joking. It's pathetic, it's really not cute.

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same. "And they lived happily ever after.

When I was little the sky was closer.

The goat, for us, is an image that's stuck in our heads since we were kids, coming from Iowa people are like 'Beware the horned goat of satan!' and all that. It's bullshit. It's just an animal.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Harry, remembering suddenly. "It was flying." Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beet with a mustache: "MOTORCYCLES DON'T FLY!" Dudley and Piers sniggered. "I know they don't," said Harry. "It was only a dream.

I found a treehouse. I found this weird tree, out in a field, and someone had put a piece of a fence, way up in a tree. I just went up there and went to sleep for a few hours, in full cowboy regalia. And someone did take a photo. I have a photo of it, somewhere. It brought me back to when I was 12 years old, sitting in a treehouse and imagining that I was in a Western somewhere.

They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination.

...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.

I think about music in the way that I heard music as a kid - like, Oh my god, there's this weird rubbery ball of undulating things.

I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.

Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.