Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.
See Lenin for a similar view from a communist perspective.
They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.
Everybody looks back on what they studied and what they grew up with.
'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.
I remember everything from 1976. I remember I was 14, and I remember my routines.
My tryst with theatre began in 1968, after the last day of school in that academic year.
My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.
When you're a child, and you're growing up, and you're mimicking a certain character, or you're trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you're playing into your real life and kind of become that thing.
In my early formative years, back in the territory days, if a guy didn't get along for whatever reason or didn't get over or things didn't work out, or he just wanted to relocate, he had other territories to go to to make, if not the same amount of money, substantially more or less.
My doctor felt that the main contributing factor was so many years of malnutrition, especially during my formative years, even before I got into modeling.
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
Everyone is the sum total of past experiences. A character doesn't just spring to life at age thirty.
I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
I feel like the eight most at-risk years for young men or young women are the four they're in high school and the four they should be in college.
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
Middle school students are at a critical time in their lives when making good choices matters - the decisions they make in these formative years have an impact on their future success.
I spent some special years in my hometown of El Paso.
My whole life, as an adult as well, I've been attracted to stories about young people. This period of time is so fertile - there's a million things that are happening, a million firsts, and to be able to witness that and record that is a privilege.
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
My education started with Latin taught at home by a governess, I can't imagine why, and for some reason I attended the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls before moving to the Dragon School at the dangerous age of 8 or so.
I have very fond memories of the '80s; they were very formative years for me. I certainly remember the Cold War. It was a closer doorstep for the Brits than the Americans, so it was a very real and palpable threat at the time.
Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.