I lost my father when I was 13 years old. He was a great man, my father, and very intelligent. I love him very much. I believe it's very important that parents have a personal connection with their children. It helps kids feel more secure, have a fee...
If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is...
My mother is a big believer in being responsible for your own happiness. She always talked about finding joy in small moments and insisted that we stop and take in the beauty of an ordinary day. When I stop the car to make my kids really see a sunset...
We've never had nannies. We've had great grandparents, great support from family, and the kids have been on every set: they've seen me play Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, the lot. They totally get it, and they want to go into the business. Ruby,...
Growing up, my parents did everything they knew how to do to support me. My dad was always kinda my roadie; he drove me from gig to gig. But I got my own gigs. I was this 12-year-old kid, shuffling business cards, calling people, telling them I wante...
Well there's nobody who has a more supportive husband than I do, and he has a business that he runs, and it's his own business, so he has work to do, my kids have school to do, I mean, people have - there are other things in life besides politics.
There were six kids in our family, and I grew up fast. I had to do a lot of things on my own. I was a rebellious teenager. That's why coming into the film business was good for me because it gave me some discipline. Once I became an actor, I had to g...
As the wonderful agony begins for 1964-65, I sometimes wonder why I do it. I've got an insurance business going on the side, and it is starting to grow nicely. Selling insurance fulfills me, in a way, like basketball. But basketball keeps calling me ...
I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. And I was. I was growing up middle-class in a time when growing up middle-class in America meant there would be jobs for my parents, good schools for me to prepare myself for a career, and, if I worked hard ...
Oscar Charleston was the Willie Mays of his day. Nobody ever played center field better than Willie Mays. Suppose they had never given Willie a chance, and we said that, would anybody believe there was a kid in Alabama who was that good? Or there was...
I have to admit that 'Psychology Today' was one of the first magazines I started reading, back when I was 13 or 14, because I was the kind of kid that was curious about the mysterious human mind - I hoped to learn about telekenisis, multiple personal...
When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big b...
When you have kids, you just love them. It's similar to when you're in love with someone. You just think they are so cool and want to be around them all the time, but what if she starts being embarrassed and only giving me charity visits? I want her ...
Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's ...
I used to listen to 'Perfect Day' by Hoku every single day in high school! 'On this perfect day, nothin' standin' in my way... Don't you try to rain on my perfect day.' It pumped me up when I was feeling down or defeated, whether it was from the cool...
Well, it's a little harder in New York. It's not as forgiving to a film crew. You hold up a bunch of New Yorkers who can't cross the street, they're not going to take it well. Southern California? They'll wait. It's cool man. In New York, they're lik...
White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied...
When I started acting, I hoped I could make some kind of positive contribution to this world. When I get a letter from some kid in Nebraska saying that, prior to Han, nobody wanted to be his friend because Asians weren't cool if they weren't into mar...
I was not a very popular kid in high school, and I had this idea that the way that I dressed would change how liked I was. It was that kind of Pygmalion story. I think, ultimately that's probably why I became interested in fashion, its transformative...
As far as superhero stories, what's appealing is of course that aspect of wish fulfillment. I mean, you start out reading them as a kid, and a couple things jump out at you - there are heroes out there, and you wish you could run into a phone booth a...
If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the U....
