My family life reads a bit like 'Little House on the Prairie.' I was big sister to Joan, Renee, and brother William, and we grew up in Dalkey, a little town 10 miles outside of Dublin. It was a secure, safe and happy childhood, which was meant to be ...
I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qua...
I come from a really poor family, and when I started doing campaigns, it changed everything for my family. I am not complaining; I had a beautiful childhood - we didn't have a lot of money, but there was always food on the table, and my parents saved...
My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to...
I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical wor...
I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they j...
When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literatur...
Our problems stem from our childhood. Ray was, for so long, the only boy. Then I arrive and take all his limelight away from him. That must have quite a profound effect. I sometimes think that Ray was only happy for three-and-a-half years in his life...
As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at ...
I spent my whole childhood watching open-wheel racing. I spent years going to England and racing open wheel, coming back and racing open wheel. It's been my world for 20 years and beyond that. For almost my whole life, I've been watching it. I watch ...
When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forg...
'Courtney' is a more punk-rock kids' book. It has this precious veneer that Courtney's terrible behavior trashes. And it's basically about how miserable it is being in junior high, watching your childhood fantasies vanish, realizing how hard life is ...
The (children's) book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions – the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity – and conceals the contradictio...
Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld.
A stable and nurturing childhood is essential for the healthy psycho-emotional and spiritual development of a human being. While we may understand what is supposed to happen to us physically, we must begin to better understand what happens to childre...
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of ou...
When you are brought up as a frozen child, you go on freezing. It wasn't until I had my four sons, who have brought me immense joy, that I began to thaw. That I realised how utterly extraordinary my childhood was.
Throughout my entire miserable childhood I woke at least once a night weeping from overwhelming delight. I did it hungry, I did it after beatings, I did it after the deaths of loved ones. Now you tell me if I’m crazy or if I’ve always been blesse...
I would come, many years later, to understand why 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is considered 'an important novel', but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and...
