I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.
The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don’t have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons—and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson—we raise children and send them to war.
Parents always have their own ideas about how they wish their children to be brought up, both morally and spiritually. But they must understand that their children are not their property; that their children are entitled to pursue happiness in any way they wish.
You will find as the children grow up that as a rule children are a bitter disappointment - their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent.
I always love working with children. I never had children of my own. God has his purposes. God didn't let me have children so everybody's children could be mine. That's kind of how I'm looking at it.
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
What I do know is that I can't hurt a ghost. I wish I could fall in love with Ann Stuart. I wish I could wed her and bed her and have children with her. I wish I could fill that huge house with little spirit children who would live forever and never die.
No bird casts the seed on land to grow food for itself, nor do beasts plough and enclose fields claiming - this is mine, this is for my children and children's children -.
I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour.
But when we have families, when we have children, this gives us a purpose for being, to protect our children, to avoid going to jail because if I'm in jail, who looks after my children, who's there for my wife?
But when we have families, when we have children, this gives us a purpose for being, to protect our children, to avoid going to jail because if I'm in jail, who looks after my children, who's there for my wife?.
When we want a cup of tea our main wish is to drink tea, but to fulfill this wish we naturally develop the secondary wish to find a cup. In a similar way, the main wish of those who have great compassion is to protect all living beings from their suffering, but to fulfill this wish they know they must first attain Buddhahood themselves and so they naturally develop the secondary wish to attain enlightenment.
I am certain that children always know more than they are able to tell, and that makes the big difference between them and adults, who, at best, know only a fraction of what they say. The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole beings, while we know it only with our heads.
You must never lose that touch of childishness. You need it if you wish to write for children, if you wish to understand the heart of a child. Children are good, you see. And they expect good.
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, Let all children come unto me.