#Personal History Quotes

“I didn't leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left me.”

“My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.”

“School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.”

“I sat in a garage and invented the future.”

“[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

“Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.”

“Seventy-five years ago I was born in Tampico, Illinois, in a little flat above the bank building. We didn't have any other contact with the bank than that.”

“You are who you are at this moment because of everything that's ever happened to you, everything that you carried forward for yourself.”

“I'm a descendant of someone bought and sold, and brought in 1619 in what was to become the United States.”

“Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.”

“My pride had been starched by a family who assumed unlimited authority in its own affairs.”

“I was born in St. Louis but lived there just for a few minutes in my life.”

“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”

“Our cellar home had a kitchen and a combination bedroom and half bath, which meant we had a sink next to the bed. We had no refrigerator, no shower or tub, and no privacy. My parents shared the bedroom with my sister and me.”

“My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.”

“"I've always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul's "Get Back." When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line "Get back to where you once belonged," he'd look at Yoko."”

“My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother.”

“It ( In My Life ) was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously about my life.... up until then, it had been all glib and throwaway.”

“"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.”

“Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.”

“When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.”

“Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.”

“Looking back, I realize that my life has been a series of incidents where one person has said to another, "Get this asshole outta here!"”

“I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian.”

“What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ?George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.”

“I literally didn't know my father. My mother had been a secretary, and after she and my father split, she went back to work for an advertising executive. So my older brother and I were "latch-door kids." We went home for lunch and after school by ourselves.”

“To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.”

“[About his marijuana use] I did. It's not something that I'm proud of. It was a mistake as a young man, but you know? I mean not going to -- I never understood that line. The point was to inhale. That was the point.”

“If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!”

“As for drugs - well, Gates was certainly not unusual there. Marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice.”

“I did not even finish my studies”