Penn Jillette Quotes

Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.

The movies of our particular childhood were so great that it's almost impossible to recapture that magic, especially as adults.

Kashi looks like twigs, so it makes me feel like I'm healthy. This cereal has been with me since childhood. Once a year in my family, we had a junk food day. I could eat Cocoa Crisps and Fruit Loops. Now I'm back eating Kashi. As much as I hate to admit it, my mother has won.

As a kid, I always had my nose buried in the side of a cereal box.

I grew up eating chicken and dumplings in my grandma's kitchen.

The first ever VHS I ever owned, my brother and I, was WrestleMania VII. We watched that thing to bits - I think the tape chewed itself up.

I'm probably going to be ashamed to say this... It was a Sir Mix-a-Lot album. I think I was 12, 13. I had just enough money for the 'My Posse's on Broadway' single, so I bought that single. That was the first thing I bought with my own money.

In general, daily strips were just a regular part of my childhood. So even if I wasn't a huge fan of most of those strips, I still read them religiously every morning while I ate my cereal.

My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room.

Bread and football - that's how I grew up.

I was watching a collection of vintage '80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes.

I just watched cartoons for three years, and that had a strong affect on me.

Look, getting bullied in school and coming home crying in the rain and my mom making me a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup with some oysterettes. It was comfort food; that is what food should be.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Music is the one art we all have inside. We may not be able to play an instrument, but we can sing along or clap or tap our feet. Have you ever seen a baby bouncing up and down in the crib in time to some music? When you think of it, some of that baby's first messages from his or her parents may have been lullabies, or at least the music of their speaking voices. All of us have had the experience of hearing a tune from childhood and having that melody evoke a memory or a feeling. The music we hear early on tends to stay with us all our lives.

When I was a kid, I lived in this small town way out in the country. We had three TV channels and one radio station. I couldn't even get my hands on good comic books. My aunt, who is a librarian, gave me Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie," and Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia." They were such incredible treasures to have in my somewhat mundane country life.

No matter what does, or doesn't, happen for me in the music industry, getting to play the Opry as a kid was always be a highlight of mine.

The '80s were a really different time for kids.Technology has changed so much of how we stay in touch and keep tabs on people.

The days of my youth I remember as nearly always in need of explanation, and not as much fun as advertised in the promotions for board games and breakfast cereal.

Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way.

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference.

I always think of childhood as the inarticulate moment, and you have your little camera. You were filming it, recording it, you just didn't know how to speak it.

My mom makes this amazing little snack that, to this day, I still think about. It's pita bread wrapped with melted butter, feta cheese, and cucumbers. That, to me, is still heaven. It's my childhood.

My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.