When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny, and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with. Of course, as the years go...
I like everything in this iPhone, iPod world where you can do everything all the time. Back in my time, you bought a vinyl record when you were a kid and took it home, and it took a bit of effort to actually get it out of the thing and not scratch it...
I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.
I don't know how other people perceive the lives of actors, but my life is fairly ordinary. I go to work, I come home, I put my kids to bed. If I'm home in time for dinner, I have dinner, and then it's bedtime.
It's strange because you - your life goes so swiftly. You look up one day you're a teenager, the next day you're a grandfather and you want to decide, 'I sure hope my kids don't make the same mistakes.'
As soon as I saw tattoos as a way to tell your story, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I totally get it.' So I got my first tattoo a couple of years ago, and it's the word 'hope' on my left arm. It has a couple of dots at the end for each of my kids.
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...
I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Bu...
Homework's hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, 'Okay.' And then I sit down and they say, 'It's math.' 'No! Not math! English, history, anything!'
The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time i...
I really like to look like a history book. I can look 1940s, I can look 1970s hippie-chic, or sometimes I'll pull that '80s Brooklyn hip-hop kid with the door-knocker earrings.
I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about 'The 39 Clues', I immediately started going through the 'greatest hits' from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and e...
I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around wh...
Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear everyday.
When I was in first grade, everyone made fun of my name, of course. I think it's kind of a big name to hold up when you're nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, 'This kid's really ...
Well, it is so difficult right now when you look out on the road and how fast people go and the more and more cars you see out there, for teenagers, you'd think a kid that literally, a few years before, was sitting back in a car seat in the back seat...
My dad loved to 'arrange things' to take us kids to that scared the crap out of us on Halloween. He'd take us to the old 'Hermit's House' at the edge of town. He'd park the car 100 yards down the street and say, 'Go back there and get something off t...
A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the...
One summer, when I was a kid, I was in the car with my stepfather, and he was asking me where I thought I ranked, on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, '6,' and he said, '3.' I think it was his way of telling me that I needed to get out and really attack li...
When I was a kid, maybe 11, I remember saying, 'When I grow up I wanna have enough money to buy a really cool car, because I won't.'
In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up fo...
