Toddlers need to get off the soccer field and onto the playground. Children need to get out of the gym and into neighborhood stickball games. We need to give kids room to create their own rules, set their own terms, and move their bodies in their own...
My wife and I have never been able to have kids of our own. Physically, it's impossible. The doctor checked. So we tend to unofficially adopt lots of twenty-somethings. I have a real soft spot in my heart for youth.
In my gym class, we had something called The Pit, this little alcove where we had to sit if we forgot our gym clothes. It was usually just the crippled kid, the pregnant girl, and me. It was pretty awkward, just hanging with all these freaks who didn...
I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see ...
I was big as a kid, very overweight. That caused a lot of insecurities for me growing up, and on top of that, I didn't like the idea of big crowds. I found it quite frightening. I enjoy the company of people who I know, and I'm probably still like th...
Okay, so, when I was a kid, definitely the drawings and the illustration. Then I stopped in sixth grade or so. And then I started again when I was in my twenties. I really didn't progress since then, so the way I draw is the way I drew in sixth grade...
With hacky sack, somebody brought one to recess in sixth grade and it kind of all went downhill from there! The same with the yoyo's! One kid brought a yoyo one day and people started getting them. I just kept at it and found that I really loved it.
I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.
I used to have 30 different species of tarantulas, as well as two Australian scorpions that are considered the deadliest in the world. If stung by one, a person would die in 30 minutes. But when I had kids I had to get rid of them, of course. Those w...
My idol growing up was Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with him. I mean, while other kids were watching Jim Carrey and the likes in the '90s, I was watching Charlie Chaplin films, because I was a bit of a geek. I became obsessed with this idea of phy...
That excitement on the court, I'm the same way off the court. I like to have fun, meet people; I like to give high-fives to the kids courtside. Just have fun. That's kind of my personality, that's how I've been.
When we were growing up, all of us kids were vegetarians. No one had asked me to stop eating meat - I just noticed everyone else around me had stopped, so I followed the crew.
Frank Booth: Who are you? Jeffrey Beaumont: I'm... just a neighbor. Frank Booth: What's your name, neighbor? Jeffrey Beaumont: Jeffrey. Dorothy Vallens: He's a good kid, Frank. Frank Booth: [to Dorothy] Shut the fuck up!
I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my a...
I lived in London for a long time, and that's a pretty white town. In Toronto, I just ended up in this circle of indie rock kids who happened to be white, too... Really, it was just when I started getting out there and meeting more people and seeing ...
I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.
If I hadn't had a baby, a part of me thinks I might have turned up on the red carpets all the time and gone, 'Hi, it's me!' Maybe other people do it because they haven't got kids and they've nowhere else to be. But because I have, I don't feel like t...
I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think rea...
Somehow, I always knew I would get married by the time I was 27. Even in college, I had this weird thing in my head that I would get married when I was 27, and hopefully my career would be stable, and I'll have kids by 30. And that's exactly what has...
As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The f...
When I was a kid, I wanted to emulate Mel Blanc, who is arguably one of the most legendary voiceover recording artists of our time. I used to watch all the cartoons where he would voice Daffy, Elmer Fudd and Porky the Pig. I knew one day I wanted to ...
