A Quote by John Boyne

I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn't need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.
My parents were fantastic. I was an only child, so I had a lot of love and too much attention. I don't think I was spoilt. My mother was quite a disciplinarian, but I did have a lot of attention and quite a lot of pressure to do well at whatever I was doing.
I don't think of myself as being troubled as a human being, but I guess I'm quite extreme, quite big and quite loud, and maybe people pick up on that when they cast me. I'm certainly not the quiet reflective type.
I feel like it's me singing back to myself as a younger person and saying have confidence in being a bit different. I really felt I didn't fit in. My dad was from the Caribbean, my mum was English, we lived in quite a white area but we were quite poor, but also quite brainy, and I was a really, really skinny child so I felt a bit awkward about all these things.
But it's funny, I really was quite introverted as a child. I just liked music, so mum and dad bought me a piano when I was seven - I actually got up to Grade Seven at the London College of Music on piano.
I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.
I dont think of myself as being troubled as a human being, but I guess Im quite extreme, quite big and quite loud, and maybe people pick up on that when they cast me. Im certainly not the quiet reflective type.
I wasn't a very outgoing child. I read a lot of books and the characters in each of the books became like imaginary friends - I immersed myself in the different worlds. I always hated finishing books that I really loved for that reason.
It's quite a job, so to speak, when you can really be with your child for 21 out of 24 hours.
I was a very quiet, shy child. I just became quite talkative in high school, in Grade 10 onwards.
At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.
A solitary child growing up in Africa, you're really quite dependent on books.
Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.
It was quite jarring to go from newspapers to magazines, and the reason I did it was because I had my second son, and with my second child, I just thought, 'I can't travel at will,' which you really need to be able to do. And so I had a sort of slow realization that I could no longer do the job that I loved.
I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
When you raise a child, you don't sit down and take all the rules of life, write them into a big catalog, and start reading the child all these individual rules from A to Z. When we raise a child, a lot of what we do is let the child experiment and guide the experimentation. The child basically has to process his own data and learn from experience.
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