I hear melodies and hooks all day. I've always been that way, since I was a kid.
I used read about Dr. King a lot as a kid. Independently, from being assigned it or being told by my parents or anything, I was just really excited about him. So I just started reading about him very young and was inspired by his legacy and looked to him as a role model.
I always loved the idea of a spy movie and part of it came from my personal love of spy movies. It started when I was growing up as a little kid in the 60s.
I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.
Well, the bottom line is that I'm extremely pleased with 'The Stupids.' I'm pleased that it's coming out, and it should look good. It's nice looking, with the colors and stuff. I made it for kids, and I really would like them to see it.
We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.
I'm not gonna be one of those actors who's like, "It's such a drag to not see your kids." Of course it is, but that's the compromise that you're making.
All the cliches are true about parenting. All I've ever wanted to do is be a father, but there's this existential mirror that's held up when you have a kid.
Now all of us in our thirties are the first generation that get to say, "I don't know how I feel about that system, I don't know if I want kids, I don't know if I want to get married."
I related so much to the responsibility of being a parent, the responsibility of "did you screw your kid up," the responsibility of letting your own parents down.
All I've ever wanted to do was be a great dad, and yet there's no stopping this existential mirror that's held up to yourself when you're about to have a kid.
I don't want my kids to ever think that I am choosing my job over them.
I hadn't heard the Gary Cooper thing so I'm not grounded now. I feel pretty good. That's incredibly nice. When I met Robin [Williams] at the read-through, I remember when he came in, I was so nervous meeting him for the first time is incredible because I did actually write him a letter when I was a kid and told him he was my favorite actor.
We live in a very modern age and the dynamic of raising kids and being a professional are intersecting a lot more - especially for women.
Other than a few years of piano as a kid, I don't have all that much musical training. I played piano for all the musicals in high school and was in a few bands, but never really considered music as a viable career until I was in college.
Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.
Let me tell you what would be a really, really great project for all of us. Why don't we start mentoring kids? Whether we're liberal or conservative, why don't we start going into the schools and giving the kids a sense of their own purpose, their own self-worth, their future, and what they can learn from us? You know, if we're mentoring kids together, we might actually begin to talk to one another again and listen to one another. We have a big crisis all over the country and in our state on drugs.
I think people are frustrated with dysfunction, not just dysfunction in government, but a lot of dysfunction that surrounds them. I get the frustration with drugs in the neighborhood or my kids with big college loans can't find a job.
If I were president, I would want to spend a lot of time going to the legislatures and telling them about best practices, whether it's about fighting poverty, whether it's about educating kids. The states are the laboratories where we can see what works. And I think presidents can have a much better relationship with legislatures.
Kids haven't changed - you have.
I think we all have a certain number of "coming of age" songs, and then a writer has to expand and grow into more varied and specific themes. And the music industry is, like Jawbreaker says, "selling kids to other kids," so it makes sense that those early songs in a writer's life are often the ones that catch people's ears, and later work is more difficult and less immediate.
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
It seems to me that a great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.
Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
