I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart such as I have felt it since my childhood.

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful it's tough it's buried in our mythic childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure.

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

It was a great experience for a kid because it was a bunch of kids playing on pirate ships and water slides so looking back on it it was the fondest experience of my childhood.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither in my experience do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience because it's complete. For another kind of writer life goes on and he's able to keep processing that as well.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do and if you were inclined to be a writer that's a help.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.