As long as you stay as a good hearted person, you will keep the innocence in your face.
Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
In my own creations, the earliest influence came from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, China, Africa and Persia. In fact, one of my earlier creations was a range of tunics, made from silk procured from the islands of Madagascar.
The single aim of my life is that every child is:
free to be a child,
free to grow and develop,
free to eat, sleep, see daylight,
free to laugh and cry,
free to play,
free to learn, free to go to school, and above all, free to dream.
Health: thank the universe for your own healing. Laugh, stress free happiness will keep you healthy.
You have to be able to invest in your own creations, to suspend your own disbelief in order to be able to write them. We all have to draw the line somewhere.
It is not common for people to think of their own lives as creations. You are not encouraged to have with your own life the kind of relationship a creator has with his or her vision. But your life can be a creation.
Once I was a prisoner lost inside myself with the world surrounding me, wandering through the misery, but now I am free. Free to love, free to laugh, free to soar, free to shine, free to give.
In your heart there is innocence waiting to be free.
The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.
There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.
My work is still very much light-hearted, positive outlook, laugh at yourself. But it isn't going to be the laugh-a-minute kind of thing that my early work was.
If you want, then start to laugh,
If you must, then start to cry,
Be yourself don't hide
Just believe in destiny.
Don't care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don't give up and use the chance
To return to innocence.
Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
Walt Disney, of all people, did a good job of describing his own netony. "People who have worked with me say I am 'innocence in action,'" he wrote. "They say I have the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder."