Commenting on playoffs to determine a national champion: I'm not in favor of 15 games either. I think that's way too much football. The thing that I feel good about is that these guys hung together through 15 games and played hard every week. That's a marvelous tribute to the kids. We just hung in there today and kept playing. It's just been a special feeling all year long.

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.

This was in San Francisco, in 1987. A bunch of kids were camped out in the Riviera Hotel - boy hustlers and their sugar daddy. One boy, Tank, showed us his gun. 'It's not loaded,' he said. He pointed the gun to his head, then out the window, and then to the ceiling. When the gun was pointed to the ceiling, he pulled the trigger and it went off. The gun was loaded after all.

Don't get in the way of children who find it natural and obvious to explore the world around them - even if it means they make a mess of your kitchen or living room. It's all about your perspective on these things. Let them play. When you do, the kids do not have to be reintroduced to ways of questioning nature, and the task of promoting science would be a trivial exercise.

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I've just always been that kid that was like, "Look at me! Look at me!," and doing performances and skits. I'm also, as most artists are, a very sensitive person, so I need that outlet to release that. Art needs to be in my life, otherwise I can't function as a human being. I heard Madonna say, "Live it, breathe it, eat it." That's how I am with the artistic part of myself.

If a kid is really interested in wanting to have a career in aviation, he's actually learning and getting some of the [basics], not even just fringe. There are things in here that movie [Planes] about like the pulp of an engine, and it's the actual engine, the actual parts and pieces. So I felt like I got schooled as well. I learned a lot just being in there and doing that.

If there's any advice I have to give, I would say it's that. If you're looking for a way to get closer to your kids, there ain't no better way than to grab 'em and read. And if you put them in front of a computer or a TV, you are abandoning them. You are abandoning them because they are sitting on a couch or a floor and they may be hugging a dog, but they ain't hugging you.

'Big Day Out' is one of our favourite festivals, it's such an eclectic mix of so many different things and it's really about music - which is what a good festival should be about. The reaction from the fans in that part of the world rivals our greatest territories and the kids are always very rabid and very appreciative of us being there, so we're super excited to get back.

I think that people are going to find more interest in the human condition, especially with them being weaned on so much reality television. They want character driven stuff along with real violence. Cage fighting is very popular with the kids right now. They see and know what one punch can do to someone's face. You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore.

Some guys that know me from when I was a kid say "My son, oh he's just like your father." It's just a natural part of our lives. But, within the music industry and within the industry of the critiques of music, where it becomes "Ziggy's music is not as good as Bob's music," I don't understand. But I don't really pay much attention to that because I'm just expressing myself.

I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.

Now that I'm a father of three kids, suddenly the whole world seems different. I don't want to take anything for granted. If you gaze on something and you appreciate it, you become a part of that circle. That seemed to me to be the only relevance I could understand. The space, the time and the vastness of it all was overwhelming. I needed to understand it or I just was lost.

I was in my teens and I was going through a bit of a phase, drinking a lot and doing E tablets and getting into street fighting and getting depressed. Then I'd listen to Marley and it lifted me out of it. I'd like to try and do the same for kids, that my music would give them a bit of hope and strength, and they'd know that I was telling the truth and I wouldn't lie to them.

Curiosity is unknown. All adults were once kids and once curious, but as adults you don't remember that and you see curiosity when it's expressed in children as a pathway to household disaster. They're simply exploring their environment, manifesting their curiosity. So what you need to do is create an environment where curiosity is rewarded rather than punished, or thwarted.

When you're a kid you're already trying to create your own world and organize the one in front of you, but then you get all insecure around 6th grade and don't think you have a right to share that. I think it was my mom's attitude about art and being part of the narcissistic digital generation or whatever that made me think anyone would care what I had to say about anything!

What I know is that if I was asked to teach mathematics in French for a week to young kids, I would do my homework and I think I could do a decent job. I don't think a degree in education would make me a better teacher. I sometimes teach in college. I don't teach for long periods of time, but I give workshops and I think I can communicate stuff. So, it's about communicating.

Absolutely invest in retirement. You can always get a loan to get kids through school. I do not know of any loans to get you through retirement. The markets are seriously low from where they were (even though they've gone up 30 percent recently). Now is the time to be dollar cost averaging; the more money you put in, the more shares you buy. Save for your retirement, people.

It's difficult to parent one kid, let alone five! It's insane. It's this strange, overwhelming mess that I would not trade for anything. I think it's more difficult in New York City. It's not like we can hop in the minivan and go somewhere. I don't own a car. It's chaos anywhere. Being a parent is difficult. Being a son and a daughter is difficult. It's a human relationship.

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

I guess I did a couple of things when I was a kid, but they weren't really acting - I think I walked down a corridor or something. Then I didn't want to do it at all. I got into it because both my parents were actors and so I went with the flow. Then I said, "I can't handle this, I don't like auditioning." I still hate auditioning, but it's less painful then it was back then.

I think we all have a certain number of "coming of age" songs, and then a writer has to expand and grow into more varied and specific themes. And the music industry is, like Jawbreaker says, "selling kids to other kids," so it makes sense that those early songs in a writer's life are often the ones that catch people's ears, and later work is more difficult and less immediate.

When I was 16, I took the written driving test, just like everybody else did, and I passed it. Then the first time I was behind the wheel of a car, when I was a kid, it kind of freaked me out. I've always been a very anxious student of anything, and so not being able to process things quickly enough, feeling overwhelmed, I just got freaked out and so I just never tried again.

In terms of bullying, there are so many new laws in America, I am not sure about worldwide, but in America, the laws for bullying are getting strict. And I am really excited of how strict they are and I think it has cut down on a lot of bullying. As a kid I was a bully and I was bullied. I lived both sides of it. To see what is being done with bullying now is super important.

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

What I discovered with acting is that you step out of your own personal life and you connect with characters that are not you and you try to understand their journey. I have three Chihuahuas, but I'm not a father. I can put myself in the position of playing a father on a TV show, by paying closer attention to my friends that have kids and by spending more time with my nephew.

How much he was shaped by being in the hospital so much as a kid. Because he was sick, he was a reader, and because he was a reader, Kennedy had heroes. Because he had heroes, he went into politics. [Kennedy liked Sir Walter Scott, King Arthur's knights, and biographies of political leaders.] If he hadn't been sick, he might have been like everybody else in the family, a jock.

I remember on Thanksgiving all the kids wanted the drumstick. There were four of us then. Well, today you can go into the supermarket and get 12 drumsticks. Years ago you couldn't do that. So I was sucking on the neck for two years. My mother told me it was the leg, and I believed it. I went to my father and said, Why is my leg always cockeyed? He said, The bird has arthritis.

Before High School Musical, I wanted to be a nitty-gritty actress. And High School Musical came along, and, I was like, "Oh my God, fun!" But the more we did it, the more prude I became.... When I am around kids and they come up to me, of course I am going to act a certain way, but at the end of the day, I'm doing this for myself. I'm going to be doing movies kids can't watch.

I jump out of the boat [in The Lost World], and I'm trying to swim to the kid, and my boots fill with water, and I start to drown, and the director has no idea why I'm flailing around. He's, "Come on, come on!" And I managed to rescue myself. I'm wet and sitting on the banks of the river, and John walks over to me and says, "Are you all right, dear boy?" "Yeah, I'm all right."

I'm a big believer that there's more power in numbers and the more you can expand the stories that are relevant to both communities, the better. For example, a school that's terrible for black kids is terrible for brown kids. We have to figure out ways to navigate the school systems and make sure that we're investing in a public education system that's beneficial for all kids.

Something in the heart of most human beings simply cannot abide pain inflicted on the innocent, especially children. Even broken men serving in the worst correctional facilities will often first take out their own rage on those who have caused suffering to children. Even in such a world of relative morality, causing harm to a child is still considered absolutely wrong. Period!

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

There's a lot of pressure on women to fulfill certain fantasies. They expect you to be a little bit of a tart, to flirt with all the men. A lot of women do it. But I'm not doing that. I talk with these guys about their wives and kids right away. When they say inappropriate things, I let them, because boys will be boys, but I'm not looking to participate in their conversations.

I come from making money in the streets. The streets all I know. All my family is still in the streets. So, it's going to be hard to pull me right back into that. When I ain't doing no shows four days out of the week, I may be in my hood or at my grandma's house in the hood. But yes, I got a kid. I got to get more serious about the music so he don't get dragged into that life.

I hide my emotions mainly because you don't want somebody to know that you feel sorry for them, because they will feel worse, or because you don't want someone to know or see your fear. If someone like a sick kid or a burn victim sees your fear, they respond to how you respond. And if you show them it's terrible, they will get upset. It's something I've learned over the years.

I liked Bugs Bunny. He was pretty good. He's annoying as a duck and he's anti-proletarian. Daffy Duck I couldn't see what was going on with him. He seemed like he was angry about something. My favorite one though is Pinocchio. I liked that kid. He was made of wood. I liked that for a start. I also liked how he'd tell a lie and his nose would grow. I liked the morality of that.

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult.

I was this Swedish kid who came over here to study engineering, but I got into movies, and suddenly I'm in this 'Rocky' picture with Sylvester Stallone. And then the movie comes out, and it's a big hit, and I'm famous. Like, world famous. I wasn't thinking of ruling Hollywood; I was thinking of just trying to make it to the next day, trying to figure out what the hell happened.

That's why I'm a big supporter of the death penalty. I want to be the hangman. I would put many more people to death like the kids who want to kill other people, I'd put 'em to death. Postal workers who get arrested, they have mental problems. You know what? When you're dead you don't have a mental problem. If you take a life, I will take yours. Put me in charge, I will fix it.

I always wanted to be a comedian, even when I was a little kid. I had a funny father who was in the news business, by the way. He was a radio news guy. So the news was always in my house, and funny was always in my house. It was sort of just baked into the DNA that I would do this for a living, but I can remember being less than 10 years old and dreaming about being a comedian.

I grew up in the South where they are very, very passionate about sports, and I was the artsy kid who didn't know much about it. I found I kind of enjoyed the social aspect, and I enjoyed the tailgating. I went for the free food and the experience. But to this day, I'm still learning. You're not going to see me watching it by myself, but if there are nachos involved, I'm there.

You know, kids need to feel like they're not being drowned out by superior competitors and they'll make that connection that, with a little more effort, I can compete. I can be competitive. I can be successful here with a little more effort and application and they learn that themselves. It's not just us telling them how hard you work matters. They need to feel it on their own.

Night terrors are in deep sleep, and they're more common in kids, as are nightmares, but what happens in a night terror is like a flash - we think a flash of some image or something happens in the brain. We don't really quite know what. And it usually ends up with the child screaming almost like screaming bloody murder. It's very scary for the parents or whoever else is around.

It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.

It is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you've got a vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community's capabilities to then move forward.

I don't care who wins because I go to sporting events to scream. It's the one place on the planet you can shout anything you want. You can bellow at will, and nobody will bother you. I yell things like, 'My life sucks! Dan Quayle is a schmuck! If I don't have sex soon, I'm going to explode!' Parents turn to their kids as I leave the stadium and go, 'Hey, there goes a great fan.

I've always had amazing women in my life help me with my kids. First it was my mom, and then a series of nannies and day care providers who were incredibly patient, kind, and loving. There is no blueprint - I think we all feel our way through it and just do the best we can, and it turns out that children are open to love from many different places and are pretty resilient, too.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

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