I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the pi...
If I could have gotten my way at an early age, I would have entered the priesthood, but my mother informed me that I could not become a priest because I was a girl. It really was the biggest blow to my ego, because it was my calling. When she told me...
My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something; edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do...
I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like...
One of the main secrets to staying young is staying healthy. I've sometimes had to suppress a smile when some young lady, who has obviously not taken care of herself through diet or exercise, says admiringly, 'Ooh, I hope I look as good as you do whe...
You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in m...
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what h...
I'm trying to take more nothing time - and that means sacrificing doing. It's partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your head. My ideal is to go back to when I was a child. My life is quieter than i...
I was trying to be 27 at age 47, but God had to get rid of my vanity. I had trouble letting go of the old Lex physically. My human fleshly nature didn't want to let go of what had come to be billed as 'The Total Package.' I guess God had to help me g...
I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. ...
I was born into a Christian family and brought up in a Lutheran church. My faith has been the center point of my life, really, since I was a child, but at 16 years of age, I fully surrendered my life over to Christ. At that point, as a teenager, I be...
The very first idea I ever had about making a film... my first thought about ever being a filmmaker was when I was sixteen years old and I wanted to make a Viking movie. And I wanted to make it in old Norse, which I was studying at the time. It's odd...
As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because y...
It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book...
I used to help my grandfather on the farm, driving tractors, raising crops and animals. I used to feed some of the baby cows and pigs, and I had to be no older than 7 or 8. Then at about 9 or 10 I started driving tractors. It showed me at an early ag...
I didn't really spend much time with anyone my own age during high school because I believed my true calling would be representing New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, and if that didn't work out, I could always fall back on becoming an Olympic pole vaulte...
it may be worth while to note again how often finely developed skulls are discovered in the graveyards of old monasteries, and how likely seems Galtons conjecture, that progress was arrested in the Middle Ages, because the celibacy of the clergy brou...
There were more recent markings as well-initials scratched over the pictographs, some with dates. people were always wanting to announce their existence to the world in a way that would surpass the ages, creating some sort of immortality. For all Kar...
In the 20th century- an age in thrall to the new- women turn out to be the newest thing of all; still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species!We are the tulip- ...
The youth. The youth of Africa. The youth of this world. Are we harnessing the potential of the youth enough? Are the young ones… giving off their best to the continent, the nation, the universe that is giving us so much? Why do we think we can onl...
We have been born into a certain Culture, at a certain phase of its organic development, we have certain gifts. These condition the earthly task which we must perform. The metaphysical task is beyond any conditioning, for it would have been the same ...
