When I was a kid, I would watch the grands prix. Everyone dreamt of becoming a race driver, while I only started thinking about it when I was 18 or 19. Only at that age did I seriously start thinking about this job. Before then, I would change ideas from one second to the next.

When I was a little kid back in Moscow, Russia, I've always thought I would become an artist or a folk dancer or an astronomer. In fact, if you'd asked me then about a life of solitary writing I would have said, "Oh how boring! Imagine, to sit at a desk all day and just write."

I think that after a while you realize that your husband can't be all things to you and certainly you don't want the kids to be all things to you, because that would be a terrible weight for them; and that where you really find solace a lot of the time is with your girlfriends.

I personally would rather raise my child in New York. It seems like it would be easier to make sure she or he gets a whole bunch of experience and understanding of the world. But, people in general think it's easier to raise a kid when you don't have so much stuff in your face.

I think a lot of people, but particularly a lot of women, get to this stage when I'd say they're over 50. We face a lot of hard judgment from the world, we women. If you're a full-time mother, you should be out working. If you're out working, your kids must be being overlooked.

It took me a long time to find out that I was born to be an actor. It was the last thing on my list, although my list was very small. I didn't know what to do. But kids weren't supposed to know what to do back then; we were all cute and we'd find out what we'd do later in life.

There are days when I'll wake up and think, oh, I've really been something. You know, it won't be the same without me. And then there are days when I wake up and I say, 'Don't kid yourself. Your contribution was minimal. You changed very little. Everything you hated prospered'.

What took me decades to learn, these kids can get on the Internet...What I learned by brute force, dealing out hands, they learn on computers. It tends to make for fairly technical players, but they make up for it with aggression, the kind that comes when you learn things fast.

Kids take work, effort, love, blood, sweat and tears and are a full time job. You have to commit, for better or worse and then give your all and hope for the best. The one thing you can never, ever do is give up and say, 'Oooops, never mind, my bad, you can take this one back'!

I just always loved mythology, ever since I was a kid. Greek mythology was something I remember learning about in fourth grade, and Egypt, too, and something about both those things just clicked with me. I just thought they both were so beautiful and interesting to learn about.

You have never seen greatness in a Presidency; I have. It was a rich kid who you would think had every reason to be a horse's ass - Franklin Roosevelt. He was humane and wise and resourceful. He was called a traitor to his class. With George Bush, that charge would never stick.

I have Type-1 diabetes, so Team 1 Diabetes is one thing I've been a part of for a while, empowering kids who have diabetes to know they can do anything they want to do. It's amazing, how much guilt and sadness comes with a kid when they find out they're diagnosed with diabetes.

Our friendship [ with Don Handfield] has remained all that time, and I'm godfather to his kids, but then when The Hurt Locker came around, I just knew there was a lot of opportunity that was coming in, and just couldn't really manifest any opportunities because things were busy.

I have to say that my kids, like every child in America, is completely absorbed with Harry Potter. And so, I have gotten sucked into it, too; I can't wait for the next one to come out. I am trying to figure out what happens with Harry and Voldemort. So we have been reading that.

I don't put on a face. I'm the same guy every time you see me. I like to laugh, I like to smile, and I don't take myself too seriously. I can be a goofball. When I come home, the only thing that changes is that I take off the suit and put on tennis shorts and play with the kids.

Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing M*A*S*H; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.

The Obama administration doesn't see schools as a public good. It doesn't see schools as places where basically we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it. It sees them as basically kids who should be part of the global workforce.

At the end of the day, most people really only want a minivan for a certain part of their lives, when they're forced to have it because they have a lot of kids they've got to carry around or whatever, so I still think that the emotional connection with the car is very important.

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 cool. How is he less than me?

I can go into a playground of kids that don't know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they're so open. They are so usable in Christianity.

The single largest variable that predicts SAT scores is family income. If you want higher SAT scores, you need to get your kids born into wealthier families. You know, it's great to tell kids to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but you better put boots on them first.

I've always really just liked football, and I've always devoted a lot of time to it. When I was a kid, my friends would call me to go out with them, but I would stay home because I had practice the next day. I like going out, but you have to know when you can and when you can't.

[On School Uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.

I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you're a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don't see so much of that anymore.

Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on 'Kids Incorporated,' 'cos we used to sit around and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that. Then gangsta rap got started, and I was infatuated with that - maybe that's why I'm fascinated by guns.

I never really cared much for Hollywood or movies. But the curiosity for filmmaking, and expanding myself as an actor and my curiosity for people and portraying them, just has grown. And that's from simply being involved in the industry. But it was never a goal of mine as a kid.

You can't please everyone. Just because I don't behave a certain way, some folks will say you don't have any street cred. I've pretty much had to put up with that since I was a little kid, just because I was raised to communicate in a certain fashion. Some people didn't like it.

Five women working together is never going to be easy. It's a lot. But God is so incredible, in terms of the timing, because we are all married with kids, in our late 30s and 40s. It's a different stage in our lives. It's not about who is going to be the one that's going to pop.

I feel kind of like a kid absorbing everything. I just like seeing people who are doing their thing, whether it's music, or a movement they're creating, or coming up with new technology. I really like seeing that there's new stuff happening. I find that the most inspiring thing.

My kids and I figured out that there’s a third kind of person, and I don’t know what you call them, but it’s somebody who sees that the glass is always full because it’s half full with water and half full with nothing, so that’s the third kind of person. I don’t know what it is.

I dont know too many parents that want to feed their kids soda, but high-fructose corn syrup is cheap. The price of soda in 20 years has gone down 40 percent while the price of whole foods, fruits and vegetables, has gone up 40 percent and obesity goes up right along that curve.

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

I got famous in my 30s. I already had a real life and kids and responsibilities, like laundry and cleaning bathrooms. It's hard not be grounded when you have that. I think, if you get super-famous and everyone tells you you're wonderful when you're 12, it's probably a lot harder.

A new biography came out that says that in high school Obama was a huge pothead … Mitt Romney had to respond to this and said, ‘It is appalling that Obama spent his teenage years goofing around and smoking pot when he should have been pinning down gay kids and cutting their hair.

You have to do all you can as a parent to stop your kid from doing all the craziness that's going on in the world. And although I still have music that's saying one thing, I still let them know what it is, and I'm not doing anything in my music that I wouldn't tell my kids about.

I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

I talk to my kids about my mothers energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.

He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

I suffered a lot when there was, like, a birthday party and I was not invited. Not because I was ugly or stupid; I was not invited because the parents would say to the kids, "Don't invite him, because he's poor and he comes from the south of Italy, and he can't give you nothing."

The families who chose me to take their terminally ill kids on their last hunts in life many times over the years know and love the real Ted Nugent. That they decide I'm good enough to take part in such a spiritual and emotional moment in their lives proves that I am good enough.

At Halloween, when fairy sprites Perform their mystic gambols, When ilka witch her neebour greets, On their nocturnal rambles; When elves at midnight-hour are seen, Near hollow caverns sportin, Then lads an' lasses aft convene, In hopes to ken their fortune, By freets that night.

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, 'What are you doing this Saturday?' and they'll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, 'Man, I'm really into remote-controlled steamboats.'

Pippin had an opening number called "Magic to Do," and Jules Fisher, the brilliant lighting designer lit it. Tony Walton did all of the sets. As a kid I thought, "Wow, I'm seeing onstage what a MGM musical would look like live." It was that good, and it was directed by Bob Fosse.

I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter account, and I don't know how I feel about this idea of, "Now, I'm eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I'm having dinner at this time." or "I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids." That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon.

I've been drawing since I was a little kid, but it's not something I love to do every day. If there's one thing I love to do every day, it'd probably be acting. I can act every day. I'd happily do it, you don't have to pay me. But that's one thing I'd love to do and get paid for.

I think that I originally became an actor because I was super, super dramatic. Over the top, all the time. I was the kid that would bump my knee and scream and cry as if I'd been shot in the face. So just automatically, the only outlet for my drama was acting and I loved theater.

So the first time you hear the concept of Halloween when you're a kid your brain can't even process the information. You're like: "What is this? What did you say?" "What did you say about giving out candy? Who's giving out candy?" "Everyone that we know is just giving out candy!"

I got to ninth grade and there was wrestling, and I went, 'Wait a minute, this is fun.' Basically, it was a chance for a small kid like me to get a chance to wail on another small kid. I went, 'I love this.' The discipline of it was great. Plus, I really started to be good at it.

Let me tell you something, I didn't become a lawyer because I like the law, the law sucks. It's boring, but it can also be used as a weapon. You want to bankrupt somebody? Cost him everything he's worked for? Make his wife leave him, even make his kids cry...yeah, we can do that.

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