As a kid, I used to run around our garden waving a stick and pretending to be a million different people. That's why I became an actor, really.
Health has always been an important thing to me. I exercise and try to take care of myself, and drink a lot of water! And I push that to my kids so that they can carry on that same energy.
I enjoy a lot of stuff. That's why I pursued a career in show business, because I enjoy watching everything as much or more than making it. I'm just a big TV and movie junkie from when I was a kid. Fortunately, it worked out.
That was how I got into music and art was being a battle kid from Jersey, so I didn't have these wonderful ways of learning commitment, dedication, practicing skill.
If we're going to change the world for the better, kids need to know that they can by feeling good about who they are and helping others.
Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.
The 1960s was probably the first time in history that young people were recognized as a big group of consumers and as a commercial proposition for Madison Avenue. Advertising played a major role in creating the ethos of that era - the idea that, "Here it is, and you can have it now." I know that many kids thought that the ethos of the 1960s was due to their own peculiar virtues, but, in fact, it had a lot to do with the realities of the marketplace and commerce.
Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.
I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.
Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.
The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.
I believe that my parents helped me to keep my natural psychic abilities open. I think most kids see angels or fairies, and because my parents were such open people, I kept that alive.
I'm just a kid having fun.
It's like, 'Wow. Yes, I had fun... but damn, was it really all worth it when I'm in a wheelchair at the age of 45 and can't play with my grandkids?'
I don't sleep very much. I really like to work, though. I feel like a kid in a candy store.
With the Internet, kids today learn things quicker than we do and they have everything there is to see, so you have to do more than just remake some old '70s film
In high school, I was one of the cofounders of New Kids on the Block my freshman year in high school. But I also started studying theatre in high school my freshman year as well. So throughout high school, I was actually doing both.
When New Kids became really successful, I got a lot of offers to do parts in movies and TV shows, but I was really busy, so I pretty much turned everything down. But I always knew it was something that I would eventually put some energy into.
When you grow up in a city like Boston, where I grew up, a lot of kids became criminals or cops. I never really had a bad take on cops other than I hate when there's one behind me on the highway.
I'm a kid who did stock and summer youth theater where we'd put up two shows and you had no rehearsal. I've also understudied, where I've had to go on with no rehearsal.
I can tell you about Hillary Clinton's heart. This is a woman, who, after law school, went down to my native South. She went down, after graduating from Yale Law School, to help poor kids, to help disabled kids.
Half the time your kids end up hating you for at least 5 of their teenage years[.] And don't ever expect anything so mundane as a thank you
The transitional period was tough, I won't kid you. You go from a certain family dynamic to adjusting to a completely new one. It took a few months for us all to fi nd our feet.
Definitely my wife and my kid [are my biggest inspiration].
