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"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics."
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"I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited."
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."
"I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort."
"When I was about ten, I was very impressed by the way Tarzan could swing through the trees from vine to vine. No one ever told me, 'Don't try this at home.'"
"For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?"
"I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one."
"Look at children. Of course they may quarrel, but generally speaking they do not harbor ill feelings as much or as long as adults do. Most adults have the advantage of education over children, but what is the use of an education if they show a big smile while hiding negative feelings deep inside? Children don't usually act in such a manner. If they feel angry with someone, they express it, and then it is finished. They can still play with that person the following day."
Explore more quotes by William Joyce
"I just took the idea that King Kong was too big for everything and reversed it and put George in a land of giants, which is basically what every kid goes through anyway - that, you know, the world is made for grownups, for tall people, for the giants."
"I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career."
"I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office."
"You know, I hate to give advice because my life has been so odd that almost nothing that's happened to me can apply."
"I have known lots of adults who enjoyed similar enthusiasms as a kid and weren't encouraged and then didn't go anywhere with it and so they're unhappy in their jobs as adults."
"So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive."
"I like stirring things up. I'm on the side of the kids more than I am on the adults. And occasionally I find some adults that have that same mischievous streak, so I don't get in too much trouble."
"I raised frogs every spring in our house from tadpoles and by end of summer our house was overrun with frogs."
"But if you really love to write and you really love to tell stories and you really love to draw, you just have to keep doing it no matter what anybody says."
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