I'm lucky; my parents have never said to me, "You're a kid, so you just don't know." They say, "How can we discuss the world and learn from these events together?"
I've learned that the universe doesn't care what our motives are, only our actions. So we should do things that will bring about good, even if there is an element of selfishness involved. Like the kids at my school might join the Key Club or Future Buisness Leaders of America, because it's a social thing and looks good on their record, not because they really want to volunteer at the nursing home. But the people at the nursing home still benefit from it, so it's better that the kids do it than not do it. And if they never did it, then they wouldn't find out that they actually liked it.
The number of kids affected by obesity has tripled since 1980, and this can be traced in large part to lack of exercise and a healthy diet.
Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.
The bad things the U.S. health care system are that our financing of health care is really a moral morass in the sense that it signals to the doctors that human beings have different values depending on their income status. For example, in New Jersey, the Medicaid program pays a pediatrician $30 to see a poor child on Medicaid. But the same legislators, through their commercial insurance, pay the same pediatrician $100 to $120 to see their child. How do physicians react to it? If you phone around practices in Princeton, Plainsboro, Hamilton - none of them would see Medicaid kids.
Somebody has to look out for and protect our kids, and I feel blessed to be a blessing to someone else.
They [Tom Hanks and Paul Newman] were simply always high level masters, and taught me as a kid actor never to be an a*shole to anybody, because it would be very tough to get past where they are.
There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.
When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.
It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it...You have to let people see what you wrote.
Young kids are taking Viagra, ecstasy. They even want instant sex.
I don't watch a lot of TV anymore. A lot of it isn't the kind of thing you can feel comfortable with watching with your kids. And I still feel that way even though, now, my kids are in their 30s.
I'm celibate. It's not that I'm a religious or moral person or anything, it's just, if you aren't ****ing Thom Yorke, what's the point? Actually, just kidding, Thom Yorke and I **** all the time. Hehehe. Had you.
I love listening to music with my mate. We don't do it often, but when we do we'll just sit there and lose our heads in it. Sooner or later he'll start saying something to the effect of "Hey, Thom, can you put in something else now?" but I'll just nod coldly and respond "not just yet". But after awhile, I'll finally budge. And that's when I crack a big smile and take out The Bends and put in Kid A. My friend just sighs and leaves the room, and I can't blame him. He's not ready for that leap yet.
I must have been a really tough kid to corral. I got disciplined quite frequently. I guess that would be the best way to say it. The rod, I wore out the rod. You know, Spare the rod and spoil the child? Well, I wore out the rod.
One area of study that still needs to be done is the kind of autism where kids have speech and they lose it. Some parents say it's happened right after vaccines. That group needs to be studied separately from others.
My name's Todd but I changed it in the first grade because there was another kid named Todd and I didn't understand that that was possible.
The schools I went to as a kid made me wary. It was clear to me that everything was a lie except math.
I went to law school. And I became a prosecutor. I took on a specialty that very few choose to pursue. I prosecuted child abuse and child homicide cases. Cases that were truly gut-wrenching. But standing up for those kids, being their voice for justice was the honor of a lifetime.
As a kid growing up, this was sometimes a little bit intimidating to have a mom who was always, like, speaking up and always saying something that might be kind of controversial . . . . The thing I think that we got out of that that was really good was, like, we weren't afraid to make waves.
This little kid pointed at me and said, 'You look disgusting!' That was the first time I thought maybe I did. I decided I'd better start eating. I'm just thankful that I made it through with relatively few scars.
I knew about things like Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground, weirdly, before I knew about David Bowie. I didn't know what David Bowie was, when I was a kid. I thought he was like Visage.
I'm seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There's no black and white to it. But sometimes I'm seeing it like I'm 4.
To me, football is very personal. Even as a kid, I looked at football in dramaturgical terms. It wasn't the score that interested me, it was the struggle.
Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.
