Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm proud to have opened [two] schools in Africa and one in Jamaica [through the Serena Williams Fund and its partners]. I was given a lot. I was given two parents. That's already starting above a lot of kids. And then I was given the opportunity to play tennis and parents who supported that. I feel I can give back.
The StarTalks - while kids can watch them, they're actually targeted at adults. Because adults outnumber kids five to one, and adults vote, and adults wield resources, and adults are heads of agencies. So if we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.
I think most cartoonists are solitary, lonely kids who use their work as a way to try to connect with the world. If I had any other skills that were more performative - if I could have been a musician or an actor - I'm sure I would have pursued that instead in order to get that instant feedback and to hear applause.
My grandmother was German. She didn't teach any of her children German. She really wanted them to be American. And now, she's since passed away, I get so frustrated sometimes. I'm like, "Oh, Oma, why didn't you teach your kids German?" My dad would have spoken German to me from birth, and I would have spoken German.
I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.
New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.
Someone asked the Swiss physician & author Paul Tournier how he helped his patients get rid of their fears. He replied, 'I don't. Everything that's worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids--all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.'
I went to a public high school and most of the comedy was coming from the black kids and the Asian kids and the Hispanic kids. And, the coolest kids to me where always the black kids. They were always fashion forward and they always dressed the coolest. They were always the best dancers, and just the coolest people.
I would get bullied a lot. You know, it was the '70s and '80s, so it was a lot of racism back then towards Indian people. And it wasn't actual hatred, it was just that blind, 'Let's pick on that guy.' You know, and you've got to figure that I was a very small kid. And I had a big mouth, so I'm sure that didn't help.
I didn't want to audition the kids so much; I just wanted to talk to them because I like seeing how they are because their mothers usually mess them up with practice. So, I'd rather talk to them and see how they respond. I just throw things at them and see how they can hit the ball back, and Saniyya Sidney was good.
I learned as a really young kid, when my dad was telling me one story and my mom was telling me another that, even as a 5-year-old boy, there was no way that both of these stories are true. Something in the middle is true, and I have to figure out what it is, what the truth is, and I never did quite figure that out.
Maybe we'll stop training our kids to stop looking at someone and automatically seeing them as Black or White or of this religion or that one etc, and instead, as a human being. Maybe we can stop forcing our ideas like, "I don't want them to marry this person because they are of this religion or this color" on them.
I get a call, and it's Howard Bingham, and he's got the champ on the line.Muhammad Ali didn't remember me from being a kid, but he was going, "Yeah, you're in bed, and you want your mama with you . . ." It really helped so much. He spent 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with me. That's a memory that I'll always cherish.
So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.
My grandfather had asked me many times whether I'd like to come to South Carolina with him. He wanted to introduce me to our people down there and I didn't want to go. In those days, the South was still a place where black kids were lynched. Something horrible could happen to you. I've had that feeling my whole life.
I'm trying to be present in my daughters life as much as I can. I didn't have any kids or really any family. I have a family but I just dove into work 1,000%. I think as an artist when you're young like that, when you move into your 30's or 40's if you have time to focus on that you need that time. It's part of that.
When I took drum lessons as a kid the teacher would always ask me if I practiced, and I'd be like 'nope' and he'd be like: "Well you're not going to be able to play the beat." So I would ask him to show me, and he'd show me and I'd be able to hear it and play it, so I've always not really been good at reading things.
The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.
You know, once you give birth, once you have kids, you realize what's important in life, and you realize it's really not difficult to be a good person. And so when people aren't good around me, I tend to move away from that. There are so many good people in the world, and you want to surround your children with that.
I played a lot of sports when I was a kid so I get in that ballgame mindset of being really, really respectful, but at same time saying to yourself, "Don't back down a single inch, hang with these guys if you can." If they throw it high and tight you have to stand in there, you can't take yourself out of that moment.
If you caught your kid raising cats in tiny boxes, forcing them to live in their own feces without clean air or sunlight, pulling their teeth and claws out with pliers to keep them from hurting each other…you’d rush him to a psychiatrist. But you support that very behavior every time you buy meat, eggs, dairy or fur.
There are multiple shows of record about a late-transitioning patriarch and how the kids are affected, and there are multiple narratives. That narrative on "Keeping up with the Kardashians," the answer is, they're pretty much fine. It's the same sort of story we were telling which is, you know what? Everybody's okay.
Imagine if you've got the diva of all divas. If we've got to be somewhere at five or six o'clock, I tell her its time to go at noon so she gets those five hours to do what she needs to do. But were both kids at heart. She is the funniest person ever and she has a great sense of humor. We connect at a spiritual level.
The idea of my kids being spoiled, I go to sleep thinking about it. I wake up thinking about. I'm trying to do the right thing. With the amount of money I have, it's difficult to raise children the way I was raised. But I took away the west and north wing of the house for those guys. So, they're not allowed in there.
I've come up with the three things you never want to hear at your kid's parent/teacher conference. Number one: 'You're only responsible for the first $10,000 worth of damage.' Number two: 'We have medication for this.' And number three: 'It was more than an ounce and he was less than a hundred yards from the school.'
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.
The sound of madness is life. It's waking up in the morning to your alarm clock, your kid crying for you, hearing the sound of the city, it's everything. Madness isn't necessarily a negative thing, it can be a positive thing. You know, hearing them cry for you, if you have children, is a great thing, it's your child.
Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it.
If a parent wants to choose where their kid goes to school, they can either fork over a whole bunch of money in tuition for private school or they can buy a new house near the school of their choice. And it's driving up property prices in certain key areas. When you stop and think about it, that's kind of ridiculous.
It's a mistake to just go make a movie where the whole thing is talking down to the kids like, "Ok, we gotta bring the IQ of this movie down because it's a kids movie" You don't have to do that, kids can laugh and parents can laugh at different parts and that's fun, and you see that with all of the great kids movies.
I can see how weird I was. One day I decided the school needed a Christmas tree and spent hours dragging this huge beast of a tree into school. No one was pleased. I got two weeks detention because I was 45 minutes late and had made a big mess of leaves and soil all over the building. All the kids just laughed at me.
People of every age group have connected strongly with the story [the March], identifying with different components of it. A sense of fairness and recognition of injustice seem to be hardwired into kids - I know it was for me, even as an elementary school kid - and I kept that in mind throughout the creation process.
The transition from sports into acting was something I got blindsided by. I had a full scholarship to law school. I had a different life planned. I started a business, and I was all ready to go. I suddenly got in a local movie, just to say to my kids one day, "Yeah, your old man was in a movie," and I caught the bug.
As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.
The brown bag, of course, had its imperfections. While some kids carried roast beef sandwiches, others had peanut butter. I have no way of knowing if all of those brown bags contained 'nutritionally adequate diets.' But I do know that those brown bags and those lunch pails symbolized parental love and responsibility.
Teaching my kids to give back is an essential part of parenting. It's not something that's optional. Compassion is one of the basic values that I want my children to have: that if they see a need, whether it's around the corner or thousands of miles of away, they should feel motivated to do whatever they can to help.
What happens when you get hurt? Take that kid at Kentucky, Nerlens Noel, who could have turned pro after high school.Who knows what's going to happen? How the operation is going to go? The only thing I do know is that he would have been a top pick in the draft last year, and he'd have millions of dollars in the bank.
I was four when I started modeling. My mom was very much an off-the-stage mom who knew nothing about the business. She married my stepdad when I was about four, and he had been an actor. Because I was a really smiley kid and could read, which is something they're always looking for, she just decided to give it a shot.
In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide - a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world.
If you were a single mom, there's no way to support yourself and your kids by working in a hair salon. It's about a woman who decides to go and do what was considered a man's job, but was treated quite horribly for it and decides she has to fight for her rights when everyone thinks she should just shut up and take it.
In a sense technology is a tool of sort of individual choice, individual creativity, individual empowerment, individual access. My kids will never understand that it used to be kind of hard to access and find things, and know what the world knows and see what the world sees. Yet it becomes easier and easier every day.
The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling-and it washed over me.
This time, we're living in such a crazy moment in history. People still write and talk about Watergate, which was such a huge, looming backdrop when I was coming of age and when I was a kid growing up. I think we're living in one of those times right now where, in 20 years, people will be writing and talking about it.
One of the biggest challenges in the past for me in working on the networks was that audiences have grown accustomed to television being something that keeps you company-background music, something that you have on while you're flipping through a magazine, cooking dinner, talking on the phone, putting the kids to bed.
In that intensely busy time of children and work, soup became my stalwart friend and I learned its true value. Anyone who's been there knows. You're busy, too much to do, time vanishes, the kids are relentless, and everyone is hungry all the time. Something as comforting, delicious, and practical as soup is like gold.
Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up.
Friendship is very important to me. With some friends, we've known each other since we were kids and it's a very strong relationship. They always tell me what they think even when I am wrong. It's great to share with them the best moments. I also have many friends in the team, and I like to share my passion with them.
There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction.
I felt like it was something that didn't represent how I wanted to present myself. Now I'll see kids I come across on Twitter or Comic-Con, and they'll smile and I'll be like, "You have a crooked mouth like I have a crooked mouth!" We just sit there, and I talk about it with them and they feel better about themselves.
I can't pin myself on any fixed religion, really. I'm just one of those sad, early-century people who just drifts around and picks up a bit of this and a bit of that. I was confirmed a Christian when I was a kid purely because I wanted a piece of jewelry, so I don't know whether this is just another extension of that.