childhood pastimes Quotes

In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

In the book, I tell the story of seeing old movies when I was young and acting out scenes at home. Now I get scripts, and I act them out.

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

I'm just a big boy, I'm still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid.

Toys are not a need people typically think of, but they've got all these kids who have absolutely nothing to do.

There are two things that I know for certain guys are good for: pushing swings and killing insects.

As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish.

As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.

All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did.