I remember I had a copy of 'David Copperfield' that I lugged around at primary school. I started reading it when I was seven, and I was eight when I finished it. I read an awful lot as a little girl and played games and imagined lots of things.
As a schoolboy, I loved Charles Dickens. His 'David Copperfield' has had the strongest influence on me - I looked up to David Copperfield as a role model.
I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.
We didn't have an awful lot of space. There were six of us born within the space of seven or eight years - I was third. I remember sharing a room with one or other of my brothers - at one point we had three single beds in one room.
I played a bee! It was a Polish fairy tale we performed at school when I was seven or eight. I had wings fixed to me.
We played video games and read books, and we went to public school. And yeah, we went to amusement parks. We did all of those things, but we also - that was all sort of organized around this nationwide picketing campaign.
I have played a lot games, worked with a lot of these players and learnt an awful lot. I've got the knowledge and leadership qualities. So, its normal that under these circumstances that I got into coaching. I'm learning an awful lot.
While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'
My most fertile reading time is when I have just finished a project and haven't started another. I binge-read and surf around bookstores.
Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.
I might be in a little decline. I don't know. How many guys that have played 150 games are still on the upswing? I've played a lot of games, a lot of snaps.
At the age of 9, I read David Copperfield by Dickens. At 14, I read War and Peace by Tolstoy. They're both books I have reread regularly since.
I had lots of time to read [being a lawyer] what I hadn't read in my school and college days. Being a bad student I barely passed my exams and I barely bothered about books. It was sports all the time. I started reading and got involved in literature and writing. The few cases I handled gave me the material for my early short stories.
A lot of the guys who played in the 1995 final for Ajax had been there since the age of 12 or 13. Patrick Kluivert and Edgar Davids had been there from age seven or eight, so I had a lot of catching up to do.
I was playing sports all the time, growing up. And then, somewhere around 10th or 11th grade, I kind of lost interest in that and just started reading a lot. I didn't know what to read. I didn't have much direction outside of school.
I just stopped reading a lot of books. I mean, I read books that I have to read for school, but I don't actually pick up a book and read for fun. On my time off, I go to movies, hang out with friends, go shopping...just little things.
I started reading seriously at seven or eight, books about myths and legends, the Narnia series. By the time I was 11, I had read all the children's books in my local library, so I moved on to 'Jane Eyre.' What I loved about Jane Eyre was that she didn't rely on her looks but her character. She had a spirit nobody could break.