Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I think I related more literally to the early 'Spider-Man' comics from Steve Ditko because it could be upfront and direct about the problems of being a kid. He captured being a teenager so beautifully.
'Harry Potter' created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That's no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.
Jackson and I spent the day together, just me and him and his children. Little underlings came and went. The PR person came and went. It was just Michael and me and the kids. And it was very interesting.
Personally I support 14,000 kids in Zambia - I feed and clothe them - but I don't hold press conferences about it. I don't do it so you'll think what a nice person I am; it's private.
I absolutely hated high school. As a freshman, I was 5 feet tall and weighed 95 pounds... When I got to high school, I had no social skills. Was I a nerd? More of a dork. Definitely not one of the popular kids.
I could maybe coach kids' basketball. I know enough about basketball where I feel like I could coach 12-year-olds pretty effectively.
I want the kids who watch 'One Tree Hill' to know that it's all pretend, and that the person at the core of that character values morals, honor and things like that. You want to inspire them to look beyond what is superficial and try to find that gre...
If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.
I stopped going to school in the middle of fourth grade. Everyone grows up with the peer pressure, and kids being mean to each other in school. I think that's such a horrible thing, but I never really dealt with it in a high school way.
I look forward to the day that a lot of the folks that you all talk about and cover on this network will begin to market products for these families and for these kids coming out of junior high school and high school all across the country.
My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.
An Olympic gold medal is something that almost seems like a fantasy. Yes, of course I want it, since I was a little kid, before I even knew what the World Cup tour was.
If you gave kids peas that didn't look like peas and said they were a space shuttle, they're much more apt to eat them because it's now playtime.
As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic.
Corner one of the hundreds of doctors who specialize in autism recovery, and they'll tell you stories of dozens of kids in their practice who no longer have autism. Ask them to speak to the press and they'll run for the door. They know better.
I haven't seen a professional player come out of New York in over 20 years since my brother Patrick came out. Blake spent a few years in Harlem, but he moved to Connecticut when he was a kid.
All the kids with fancy shoes or clothes, do you know what I got with a family of nine? When ever we said let's play poker, we had a full team of adults right there.
Children usually have a natural curiosity about the world and everything in it until they get to school and somebody throws them against the locker because they get A's and act intelligent. After that, some kids try to dumb it down and adapt.
What I'm really addicted to is getting people to understand that if their kids aren't competent readers coming out of middle school, it's really going to be hard for them in high school.
