Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been acting since I was six. I actually played a boy when I was six in 'Tommy.' I played Tommy and they put a wig on me. They put up my hair and put this little boy wig on me and that was my first acting experience. Then I did some other professional theater. I did Shakespeare when I was older.
I've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.
My teacher told my mum, 'I think William has dyspraxia,' and Mum asked what that meant. She said, 'Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.' Mum was like, 'Yeah, that's my boy'.
I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.
'Mixtape' sounds retro! I used to make lots of mixed tapes. It was one of those '90s things - every girl gave them to her best friend. I remember exchanging a few with a boy on a bus when I was 14. I thought he hated me, but in hindsight, maybe he was in love with me, because he gave me the best music.
Despite girls' sparkling resumes - including rates of college enrollment and high school grades that outstrip boys - sexism is a barrier that still leaves girls ambivalent about power. Opening doors has not amounted to ambition to lead for many of them, even those with options, networks, and resources.
I am originally a surd who was born in Delhi in 1982, just two years before the Sikh riots, so all my childhood pictures are in baby frocks with ponytails, as my parents wanted to hide the fact that I was a Sikh boy, given the riots. My dad worked for a travel agency, and we soon moved to Saudi Arabia.
Elvis used to have parties at his house - and I've told this story a million times - but they weren't really parties, because there was no chips or dip. Just Elvis and his boys watching TV, and him making funny comments, and everybody laughing at them. Is that a party? Not really. But that's Hollywood.
For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.
I remember when I was in high school I didn't have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.
There is so much to sailing a ship. There's about a thousand different lines on a brig ship, and knowing what each one of those does, it takes a long time, and that's why you have these cabin boys that start on the ship, and they learn throughout the years, and that's why it takes so long to captain one.
I knew that I was a gay boy fairly early; what was interesting to me was that my mother didn't know. She made me play baseball - I had no desire to do that. I said, 'Mom, I don't like direct sunlight, I don't like bugs, I don't like grass, and I'd rather be in the house playing with your fabric samples.'
Because I was the only child, I was completely indulged. My father thought I was the best looking boy. And even though I was at 100 kgs., he dismissed it as puppy fat. He thought that the sun came out of my head. If I got five out of ten marks, he thought I was half there and had only half way more to go.
It hadn't really percolated through my brain that I was going to see real, live TV from the surface of the Moon, and boy, oh, boy, had that Saturn V launch been exciting! And then, there it was - late at night, sitting up, watching, and there was Neil Armstrong actually standing on the surface of the Moon.
I did not fire Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. I cannot fire Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. I am not his employer. I do not have such authority. And even if I did, I would never fire Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys. I love Brian Wilson. We are partners. He's my cousin by birth and my brother in music.
I was my father's son and my mother's daughter. There was never any time when I felt I wasn't equally capable - whether it was being the only girl in the county who could hit a jump shot in basketball or playing first base in the baseball with the boys. I was always encouraged to do whatever I wanted to do.
My first job in TV was hosting this young teen magazine show, and all these high school teenagers showed up from all over Sacramento, California, and they chose four of us to host the show, two boys and two girls. And of the two girls, I was kind of the perky smart one and the other girl was the pretty one.
Even with the 'Top Boy' series with Ashley Walters... I've been talking like on the creative direction wave with Drake about the series. Making greatness with it. The whole style of what's going on in London, the sound, is real. It's an actual thing that actually happened. So it deserves to be on the telly.
I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It's sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn't find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing 'Hedwig,' I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.
The label 'liberal' or 'conservative,' any - every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from 'Iolanthe.' It goes, 'Every gal and every boy that's born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.' What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.
The scripture is filled with examples of genuine masculinity; you could mine David's story for probably a year by itself. And we have to get the masculinity of Jesus back. Not the pale-faced altar boy, but the man that made a weapon and cleared the temple, who boldly cast out demons and calmed the raging sea.
The Cure wrote 'Boys Don't Cry,' and it's the same today: as a boy, you're not meant to show your emotions, but if you don't have a job or any prospects, you're going to be depressed, and it will be much worse if you can't express that. I hate the term because it's become a buzzword, but it's toxic masculinity.
When men and women, boys and girls, are denied the right to education, the right to own land, the access to basic services like healthcare and clean water, a fair price for the crops they grow, a fair wage for the work they do, or the right to be part of making decisions that affect them, the result is poverty.
It is easy to bare your body, but it is difficult to bare your soul. What works for me is that I am not a city-raised boy with city-raised sensibilities. I can play the vulnerable tough man, the guy with a gun in his hand, tears in his eyes, fire in his heart, innocence in him, and in his arms a woman he loves.
In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.
Often, when a girl has a crush on a boy, her friend will dare her to speak to him or ask for a pencil, or better yet, let him know that she has a crush. Pretty risky stuff... It happens thousands of times a day in the lives of teenagers everywhere. Putting yourself out there. Daring to expose your true feelings.
In my class - in all fifth-grade classes - we were required to read 'classics,' books like 'Shiloh,' which is about a white boy and the dog he rescues. And 'Old Yeller,' which is about a white boy and the dog that rescues him. And 'Where the Red Fern Grows,' which is about a white boy and the two dogs he trains.
I rarely felt or noticed any real divide between girls and boys when I was growing up. Maybe it was because I was so involved in sports and competed with the boys. Maybe it was my mom and dad, who constantly instilled confidence in me and never made me feel as though there were boy activities and girl activities.
Playing nuts is a game like any other, neither better than tops, nor worse than cards. The game is played in various ways. There are 'holes' and 'bank' and 'caps.' But every game finishes up in the same way. One boy loses, another wins. And, as always, he who wins is a clever fellow, a smart fellow, a good fellow.
To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
The Beach Boys set the bar for pop sunshine more than 40 years ago, and the genre hasn't changed that much since. Surfer Blood's 'Floating Vibes' rounds the usual bases with an upbeat attitude, and the string swells closing the track are a must, but the band manages to infuse all those old sounds with fresh energy.
It's very important for feminism for us to tell our daughters that they should be strong. But to tell our sons that they can be vulnerable, to have these characters on screen that are not perfectly masculine cowboys that never fail, for our boys to change their psyche as well, that's equally important for feminism.
I guess 16, 17, 18, that whole period was a dark time for me. I guess it was a hormonal thing, going through all those changes as a young woman, learning who you are and being comfortable with yourself, and also, which goes along with that, boys. It was definitely an unhappy, 'Who am I?' period. 'Who am I gonna be?'
I have a deep, scratchy voice. Boys would call me Froggy, and my father would often tell me to shut my 'big bazoo.' I remember standing in line for confession. After I walked out, the other kids were like, 'You punched your sister in the face?' Because of my voice, my confession was like speaking into a loudspeaker.
So what 'Twilight' does is show how women/girls can drive box office and they can support a tent pole movie. They're an extremely passionate fan base. This coincided with the 13 year old boys starting to stay home and play video games and work on their home media stuff. They're no longer going to theaters in droves.
Some coaches prefer players who will just do whatever he tells them to. It's like, if you're at school with a load of 10-year-old boys and you tell them to jump, everyone will start to jump. But the intelligent boy will ask, 'Why should I jump? Why?' That can be difficult for a lot of coaches, and I understand that.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and none of the other Backstreet Boys live in Georgia. So a lot of times, when people come to my house they're like, 'Hey, is A.J. here?' Or, 'Is Kevin here?' Or, 'Is Nick in the bathroom?' People think we live together and we spend all the time in the world together, but we really don't.
When I was a boy, the priest, my uncle, carefully inculcated upon me this proverb, which I then learned and have ever since kept in my mind: 'Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum; Nunquam servili, sub nexu vivito, fili.' 'I tell you a truth: Liberty is the best of things, my son; never live under any slavish bond.'
Being the vice-captain, you see a lot of things on the field. You have to try and help the captain as much as you can and lead by example on the field. Small things like getting a run-out or taking a catch makes the other boys try and lift their standards. So yes, I do have an important role, even if I'm not captain.
I don't see people. I don't see men and women at all. When I see them, I see... their mothers and fathers. I see how old they are inside. Like when I look at the president, or anybody in a record company, or a store owner, I may see a little boy behind the counter with the face of an old man. And that's who I talk to.
'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
I played the piano as a boy for six years, from the time I was six to 12 years old. My piano lessons ended when my father died because our family had no more money. I used to have a mestiza teacher. She'd come once a week to teach me piano lessons, and she'd bribe me each time with an apple; otherwise, I wouldn't play.
There's always a Justin Bieber. Ever since I've been around, there's always been one of him. You know, you can trace it back from how old you are and the boy bands that came along then and the teen sensations and whatnot. And, you know, good for them. There's a few of them that make it out and a few of them that don't.
The Wire' was from a police perspective - in terms of the streets and that, it was probably like, thirty per cent. 'Top Boy' is really from the perspective of the quote-unquote criminal. It's getting into the mind of these people and why they do what they do. It's bigger than just 'Woke up and wanted to be bad one day.'
I ran to get my cassette recorder and sang 'We Got the Beat' into the recorder to document it. I knew I had written something special. It took two minutes. I didn't labor on the lyrics. It's a simple song, which goes back to the '60s, when I had my ears glued to the radio for the Stones, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys.
I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing.
Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.
That's why I like to get out there, and get people to see the other side of Mitt, and know us in a different reflection when you see the family and how funny he is with the boys and with the grandkids. And you know, just what a super guy he is. That's part of what I am doing, is letting people see the other side of Mitt.
Hopefully everybody in the audience thinks, 'That's cool. I could do that.' I don't like the thought that they say, 'I saw the Beastie Boys last night, and they're mega-stars.' I'm a lot happier when the kids who come backstage or to the hotel try to give us tapes of what they've done instead of just getting an autograph.