
“Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.”
As quoted in The Listener (1978)
The Precession of Simulcra, The Hyperreal and the Imaginary
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
“Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.”
As quoted in The Listener (1978)
“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
“It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility."”
The Great Comic Book Heroes http://books.google.com/books?id=zxbuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+is+not+size+or+age+or+childishness+that+separates+children+from+adults+It+is+responsibility%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage (1965)
Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)
“[…] Tradition is not a childish and outmoded mythology but a science that is terribly real.”
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Nobel lecture as quoted in The Observer (17 December 1978) Variant: "They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff."