On rainy days or summer evenings or during long programs designed for adults, we were not allowed to say, "This is boring" or "I'm bored." If she even thought she smelled those words coming, she would quietly remind me that my attitude was what I mad...
I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they'r...
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a ...
Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn't have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I'm a pure American - even more than people who are born here - because I did it by ...
Generally I find that kids ask better questions than you get with adults. Something that kids will do a lot is, they're so nervous, and they're not really paying attention, so they'll ask the same question someone just asked. And you're trying to be ...
Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller...
[last lines] Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue steel beauty. The greatest Christmas gift I had ever received, or would ever receive. Gradually, I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting o...
Ralphie: Heh, I was just kidding, even though Schwartz is getting one. I guess I'd just like some Tinker Toys. Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] I couldn't believe my own ears. Tinker Toys? She'd never buy it.
Ralphie: Scut Farkus! Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] Scut Farkus! What a rotten name! We were trapped. There he stood, between us and the alley. Scut Farkus staring out at us with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So, help me, God! Yellow eyes!
Ralphie as Adult: [narrating] Over the years I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. My personal preference was for Lux, but I found Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor - heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness. Life Buoy, on...
Adult Pi Patel: My uncle Francis was born with too much water in his lungs. They say the doctors swung Francis around by the ankles to clear the water out, and that's what gave him the huge chest and skinny legs that made him such a great swimmer.
Bill Sampson: You know, there isn't a playwright in the world who could make me believe this would happen between two adult people. Goodbye, Margo. Margo Channing: Bill? Where are you going? To find Eve? Bill Sampson: That suddenly makes the whole th...
When I was younger, humans went to the moon when I was about 4 years old, and I imagined that as I got older and became an adult that traveling in space was going to be fairly common and something that we all did. So I grew up believing that I'll be ...
You see an absolutely brilliant film later, as an adult, and you walk out thinking about what to have for dinner. Whereas something like Jaws winds up having a huge effect on me. If only my parents had been taking me to Kurosawa films when I was eigh...
As a child, I always enjoyed - my parents used to have these little cocktail parties - and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren't supposed to say. And in many ways, that's what my job is today; it's getting people to t...
Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read Y...
We need games like 'A Closed World' for many reasons. When you hear another developer talk about how games need to grow up, they need to tackle adult themes, and how they need to embrace that ability to transport the player into a different world, th...
All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backw...
Words! What power they hold. Once they have rooted in your psyche, it is difficult to escape them. Words can shape the future of a child and destroy the existence of an adult. Words are powerful. Be careful how you use them because once you have pron...
The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain th...
Since my trips to Earth, I've only managed to assemble a few basics facts about humans, condensing them in to four, overall points: kids got Reese's, teens got recess, adults got recessions, and seniors got receding.
