Early Hardship Quotes

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, literally without education.

I really believe I'm no different from anyone else. I just had a few challenges I had to learn from at a very early age.

From the hour when the Puritan baby opened his eyes in bleak New England, he had a Spartan struggle for life.

I grew up in a very open-minded family. My father died when I was very little, so my mother was really, really incredibly busy trying to provide for us.

I was fighting men at age 10.

I would not call it a difficult life, really. I just had a lot of challenges at a very young age.

I had to be an adult very quickly and didn't have any friends.

I saw a lot when I was young. The first time I got arrested I was twelve years old.

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

The only challenge I faced in the beginning was that no one believed I could seriously see a film through.

I went through big things at too young of an age, but, naturally, when you're young you're also adventurous.

I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, as the youngest of four children and the only girl. My father died when I was only a year and a half. He was killed in a car accident when he was 26.

The first thing the world does to a genius is to make him lose all his youth.

I don't want to go all Michael Jackson on you, but I never really had a childhood.