My parents wanted to name me Karim Hill. My aunt always liked the name Dule, from this actor Keir Dullea, who was in '2001: Space Odyssey.' That's how I got the name Karim Dule Hill. Growing up, I never liked the name Karim because people would ask me, 'Could you dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?'
I didn't know a single musical soundtrack, really, growing up. Nobody listened to musicals. That wasn't a thing I did.
When I was a young girl I had to deal with people calling me weird and strange because I spent so much time around boys playing football.
I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
I've always had gender confusion. I had two older brothers, and I've been predominantly male influenced. I really always looked up to my dad, really always looked up to my brothers... I had a lot of male friends growing up. It didn't help that in my town, where I lived, there were no female musicians.
I'm lucky that I was born to these parents. I'm lucky that my dad wanted to be around me, that he took me to all these National League cities by the time I was 12.
My home and my upbringing and just the problems in my family within my extended family were such that it truly was a mix of the good, bad, and the ugly.
My whole family actually, but my parents. I had such a normal and amazing childhood. I've been so lucky. My parents are cool and normal. They don't talk about the business and I still have stuff to do at their house.
I do take for granted, probably, the fact that I grew up in New York City, one of the most liberal places on earth, with bleeding-heart, liberal parents who took me to see 'Rent' and Terrence McNally plays from a very young age.
When I was a kid, my parents had a 900-pound television on top of a TV tray. My dad's theory was, 'Let him pull it over his head a few times, he'll learn.'
Many of the most highly publicized events of my presidency are not nearly as memorable or significant in my life as fishing with my daddy.
I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.
I have three boys. And I wanted to make sure it connected with them and then those guys who grew up like me, in environments like me.And then I knew something about science that your New York Times reader would be interested in. So I was thinking about it in multiple ways: I'll connect with the people who grew up like me first, and then the New York Times reader will be interested in the science because it's so good and they want to be "in the know."
Fashion is such a weird thing. Growing up, I just made do with whatever I had access to - a lot of hand-me-downs and thrift store shopping.
I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
If I look back down the years, how I was treated as a kid, if it wasn't for the teachers at my school, then I wouldn't have achieved what I have. You have to look where you came from, and we do need to get more parents involved, more running clubs and more schools. They can make a difference.
I regularly go to concerts with my children sharing the music.
I've always been independent. My father was in the army, so we moved every two years. I had to go round and bang on the neighbour's door each time to find out if they had kids I could play with.
My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School.
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.
We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.
When I was a kid, nobody in my family had a car. And I didn't have many toys. The only toys I had were the ones I would steal.
When I came home my parents were listening to Pakistani Qawwali music, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they're listening to music from Mali, like Ali Farka Toure, they're listening to Brazilian songwriters, like Gilberto Gil, to opera, to Neil Young even, things you don't hear as a kid in Caracas. I love all the music they turned me onto.
Basically, my socialization as a child didn't come from any schooling; it came from being in theater and meeting people online.
