Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever; I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister's head using alginating plaster.
I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.
As a kid, 'Star Wars' was much more my thing than 'Star Trek' was.
With three kids you are just trying to survive. You can't be fastidious.
Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.
I'm nice with damn kids, man. Kids love me. I can bounce back and forth. I can discipline kids and I can get into the mind of a kid.
Being a parent is about your survival. Surviving the terrible two's is the most important thing. Kids get heavy. Quite literally. They're heavy to lift up when they're throwing tantrums.
Every kid wants to give their family a better life.
We are missing the truth. We live in a society that lies and fosters and sells dishonesty at a discount. Remember the line, 'America spells cheese K-R-A-F-T? That does not spell cheese! We tell our kids that as long as it looks good on the outside, don't worry about the inside. Or work hard and you'll be rewarded in the end. That's not necessarily true anymore. We don't tell the truth about certain things. Young people see our hypocrisy. We haven't given them a model to follow.
I'd love to have three or four kids. But my mom always says: "Speak to me after you have your first".
I listen to kids play a lot.
I love to work with young kids.
I breastfed both my kids for two years so, you know it was very tiring emotionally and physically.
In Crash, you've got a pathological cop who at the end justifies police brutality. He tells the naïve, young cop that you're going to end up the same as him. He's the most sympathetic character in the movie. So, the naïve cop ends up murdering this Black kid and tries to cover up the evidence. It sort of justifies police brutality and the planting of evidence which is what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.
David Simon [the creator of The Wire] and I have a running controversy for years. It all stems from a telephone call I made to KPFA [Pacifica radio] when he was a guest there in the 90's on Chris Welche's show. He was going around the country with a Black kid from the Ghetto to promote something called The Corner - it was all about Blacks as degenerates selling drugs, etc.
I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that.
I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood.
Even though being a kid is kind of a carefree sort of thing for the most part, I guess there are definitely a lot of things that stick in kids' minds.
The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.
Kids get a lot of lip service in disaster planning, but they tend to get far fewer resources than they need. The mantra of 'children are our most valuable resource' is almost never matched by actual funding.
It's crazy for somebody who's kind of empowered and wealthy like myself to say, "Oh, I don't need to be patronized by the state, I can make my own choices." But I've got things to look forward to, and places to go and if that'd been me there forty years ago, when I was a young kid in Muirhouse, it might've been a different story.
As a Greek woman, the most important thing you can do in life is get married and have children. You could win the Nobel Prize, but if you don't have a husband and kids everyone feels bad for you because you're a failure.
I had been performing since I was 5, so it wasn't like I hadn't been on a stage before. I was always older than my age. That's my nature. I've always been a kind of mature kid.
I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.
