I think I always wanted to have adventures in my life. I was always kind of a rambunctious kid.
As a kid, I think people would have described me more as a goofball, or being energetic. But I always loved parodies; I loved spoofing things.
The fate of the African continent does not f-ing depend on a load of f-ing musicians in Hyde Park singing f-ing s-t songs to kids.
My kids have got to work themselves around my life, not the other way. That's how kids become brats, if you're there staring at them all the time going, 'Are you alright?'
I was playing guitar before I heard The Beatles, but as I got older and listened to their tunes I realized they were amazing. They inspire me more now than they did when I was a kid and are still the greatest.
When I was a little kid I wanted to be Face. I thought, cos I had blond hair and he did too, that when I grew up I'd look like him.
When I was a little kid I always wanted to be ginger. My best friend was ginger and he was pretty cool.
I don't feel that I'm a role model. I'm just me. If people want to look up to me then that's their business. I'm not perfect and I don't consider myself to be a role model. But to be honest, I'd much rather my kids look up to me than look up to some rock star who gets off jail more times than is even funny.
I'm always willing to work that little bit harder to achieve what I need to achieve because I feel like it's a blessing for me to be here. I was never supposed to be here. I'm the black council estate kid, single parent, from West London, with friends that are in jail, friends that have committed heinous crimes, friends that are doing nothing. I'm not supposed to be here, therefore I have nothing to lose. I'm always going to work harder than everyone else because if it doesn't work, "So what?".
I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.
You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.
I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.
When [ Paul Johnson] got to me he was in trouble, because I'm an old-fashioned conservative: married when I was 21, stayed married, 3 kids, live in the suburbs, no scandals, so nothing to write about. So what he did is concoct one of the nuttiest claims I've ever seen.
I'll have 15 letters today from mostly young kids who don't like what's going on and want to do something about it, and [they ask me] if I can give them some advice as to what they should do, or can I tell them what to read or something.
The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.
In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.
Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.... Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.
I think sometimes bad behaviour can be liberating for certain people. They need to behave badly to find themselves - to go off path to find their path. You see it with kids all the time: They're testing boundaries, and I think that's healthy.
Adaptations are fun for me because they connect to the idea of filmmaking I had when I was a kid. I would see a movie and think: 'I'm gonna make that movie.'
When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.
If the movie [The Hunger Games] were stylized violence that was pretty and fun and cool, which is great when you go see 300 or The Matrix, it would just be out of sync with the fact that they're kids.
I was 14 when the wall came down, so I only ever knew about the GDR or experienced it as a kid. I lived very far away from it, and you only ever thought about the GDR when you saw the Olympics, because you were like, "How are they always winning?!"
I was into opera as a kid - I'd play 'Carmen' and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.
There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do.
I'm not a perfect mom, but I'm perfect for my kids.
