Childhood Mischief Quotes

When children stand quiet, they have done some ill.

When I was five - it's not even bad - I stole a sweet from the sweet shop.

I wasn't that over-the-top, but I got sent to the principal in first grade for talking. And my father was for a long time the president of the Board of Education. That was always a hard note to bring home.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

We used tea towels for gloves until we got proper ones and were always breaking our mum's ornaments. She'd come home and find us all sat in our boxer shorts, out of breath and our skin red raw. She hated it.

Then there was a kid in the neighborhood about three blocks away, his name was Bobby Beavis.

I was a sloppy kid, wanted to be just wild.

I was just so rambunctious as a little kid. It started because I hung out with my older brothers and their friends. I always had to fight to prove I was tough.

I was quite naughty at school.

When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.

I have always been an avid bike rider. Even before I became an avid bike rider, I was an avid bike stealer when I was a kid. I am very educated on bikes.

Clocks around our house were in danger because I loved to take things apart, and failed to put them back together.

I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I've always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.

I burned down my backyard as a seven-year-old. I poured kerosene over dried leaves and set the whole place on fire, just for fun. Yeah, not a very normal thing to do.

Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

Kids are anarchy writ large.

I was a full-blown tomboy; I was very mischievous and got into a lot of trouble. Everybody in my family smoked, and I started smoking probably when I was nine. My friends used to call me Huckleberry Tig.

Artemis felt like he was six again and caught hacking the school computers trying to make the test questions harder

I have two older sisters and one older brother and hold them largely responsible for the trouble I got into growing up. I believe as the youngest child, that is my right.

My mother would thump me sharply on the head with a thimble or a spoon if I became too noisy with the whistle when I was playing I was a steamboat captain. She had no sense of the dignity of command.

My boy is a mean kid. I came home the other day and saw him taping worms to the sidewalk, he sits there and watches the birds get hernias. Well, only last Christmas I gave him a B-B gun and he gave me a sweatshirt with a bulls-eye on the back. I told my kids, "Someday, you'll have kids of your own." One of them said, "So will you."

I think kids like chaos, in an interesting way. I think kids like to push buttons in adults. They like to antagonize and cause trouble. I think it's the kid-like spirit that kids respond to.

You know, I used to warm the thermometer on the light bulb... I was really good at being sick. I could forge my mother's signature on a sick note so well I was hardly ever at school.

I wasn't stealing cars at like, six. But I've always been bad.

All of us were mischievous at some time or another, I more so than any of the rest. [My brother] Philbert and I kept a battle going. ... Even in our fighting, there was a feeling of brotherly union.