I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.
My songs are like my kids.
I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. ... I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14-to meet women. ... If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings. ... My songs are like my kids.
One of the last times that we played in the area before I wrote "Allentown," I remember a guy coming up to us and saying, "You're never coming back here." I said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Well, you're probably gonna become a big star. Nobody who ever becomes big comes back here." And I felt so sad for this kid, he seemed so bitter about it. I said, "Well, I'm coming back, no matter what."
From a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia Rode a boy with a six-gun in his hand And his daring life of crime made him a legend in his time East and west of the Rio Grande. Well, he started with a bank in Colorado In the pocket of his vest a Colt he hid. And his age and his size took the teller by surprise, And the word spread of Billy the Kid.
If you tell kids they can't have something, that's what they want.
I compare songwriting to childbirth. How many kids can you have before your uterus explodes?
There was an edge of, 'Go away kid, you're bothering me'. I've kicked myself a million times since. I could've discovered Whitney Houston.
Theres so much beautiful music in the world, and the kids are getting robbed.
It was a struggle for me as a kid and everyone knows struggle, whether it's financially, economically, your dreams of becoming whatever you want to be.
It was pop culture, entertainment, Hollywood, award shows - these are the things that really captivated me as a kid. I would watch the Oscars and every award show with my parents. I would make lists of who was going to win.
I never fully committed to the child actor thing. I also liked being a regular kid and being a student.
When I opened my mouth to sing as a kid, I kind of randomly had a really good singing voice. And so that put me on the actor track and the musicals track.
Today the kids that are out now they make a hit record and they put them right out on the stage with 10,000 people out there and they don't know anything about the business yet.
Bambi, to a kid, was scary.
I was introducing [director and producer] Hal Roach - Mr. Roach was 100 years old, he was one of the fathers of early days in films, he put Laurel with Hardy, he created the Our Gang kids, and all these silent movies he did - he was a giant.
There's only, I think, in life, three things that I do pretty well: Performing, I still can field ground balls, and I make nice kids.
Since I was a kid, every Thanksgiving growing up in New York, we always watched 'The March of the Wooden Soldiers' by Laurel and Hardy. Never miss it.
Kids need a happy household. They need to be loved and supported in their dreams. And I don't think you can make your kids' dreams your own. They need you to support them in their dreams.
Actually, I was having dinner with Michael [Stipe, of R.E.M.] when our second album went platinum, which up until that point was the highest success we'd ever had. And he turned to me during dinner and said, 'Welcome to the deep waters, kid.' I'll never forget that.
I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.
Kids won't watch older movies - they want to see what's hip right now.
If you're going to take care of your kids and pay for your house and do something good for adults, you have to do something on television now.
I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.
I know that I loved music before I loved movies, simply because I didn't see movies as a kid.
