There are a lot of young Canadians who want to be politically active at their college or their university who can't go to the party convention, who can't take part in politics, because they're holding down a job to pay their tuition. These are kids who want to do public service, who want to get involved politically, but their financial situation is precarious.
Liberals don't want any part of Canada left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don't want to have a country where you think, "my kids have got to move to the city if they're going to have any kind of future." We've been saying that, and we've not got through.
The Conservatives hold rural places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, "Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don't care about you and want to leave you dead by the roadside." We've simply got to go out and say, "they're lying to you about us. We actually care about you more than the other guys, and we're not going to pander to your prejudices - we're going to give hope to your kids."
No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.
The smaller and younger kids are, the more patient you have to be. But if they're gifted, then it's a wonderful present that you're given by having a child like that in your film... more so than in the case of actors because, for example, if you ask them to play a lion, they don't then play a lion, they actually are a lion. So, a gifted child is something very special. On the other hand, if a child has no gifts in that way it's absolutely hopeless and there's nothing you can do!
Neuroligacally, human beings haven't caught up with today's overstimulating environment. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference.
I kind of grew up a guitar nerd and I tried to figure out how to shred on an acoustic guitar as a kid, while listening to jazz or whatever. So that is kind of a different thing and my church background, growing up with worship kind of the ground that I learned how to play music from. Those are all odd ways of growing up, compared to most people, so I think the music has plenty of uniqueness in that.
It's very rewarding if I make a difference to a kid.
I'm just a skinny kid from Maywood trying to do my best. I never took anything for granted. I never wanted to come off like some kind of big-headed, conceited athlete.
I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.
The issue of redistribution of resources and wealth needs to resolved systemically, but in the meantime but there are individual spots you can occupy. There are things that you can do on a daily basis that will make a difference in moving the needle in individual lives. When we look at the mentoring of young black kids, for instance, the number-one mentor group is white women. I think after that maybe it's black women, and then white men, and then black men. We can make all kinds of arguments about that.
I was a bookish kid, not really athletic.
I saw all those great '70s films when I was 9, and no one in my Brooklyn neighborhood cared if a kid watched an R movie.
All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.
I think a lot of high-profile artists like to make people think that. Oh, Im trying to choose my next project. This is a job. Sometimes your next job is so you can provide for your family; your kids are 16 and getting ready to go to college.
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.
As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren't there before. That's awfully simplified, but that's how it is.
It's a bit shocking when you show up in Africa or you're in the middle of Spain and there are people that know the words and the young kids singing along.
A lot of subjects blend into the same thing: intolerance. When you're a little kid, you don't know that it's going to get better. Your life experience hasn't told you that. I want to protect those people. I want to send out a message and at least try to get that across.
The fact that there's a more open discussion about everything from feminism to racism ... I look at my two boys ... this is their future I'm talking about. When I'll be long gone, it'll be them and their kids. I know that sometimes the darkest times are followed by the lightest. Sometimes bad things have to happen for good things to happen. At the very worst, we're having very open discussions, discussions about things we didn't even know f-king existed. I talk to my friends about it and they are absolutely shocked. They didn't even know.
Keep in mind, Mike Bloomberg's kids and grandkids are breathing that air just like the coalminers' families are breathing that air. And the coalminers are the ones that have the conflict. They want their jobs, I understand that. They need to be able to feed their families. They also have to worry about their health and the health of their families.
When I was a kid, I really liked playing chess, which is pretty geeky; I just enjoyed it - thinking, exercising my mind. And I found computers to be like an eight-hour day chess game.
When I was a kid I used to go to the movies, double features in outdoor theaters, and my parents used to take us to see like, 'Cat On a Hot Tin Roof' or something like that, with Elizabeth Taylor.
When I was a kid everyone used to call me pork 'n.
