Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The NBA is a culture shock for college kids, and even more so for kids from another country. The NBA is a unique environment, so there is going to be transition for any young kid, but I think coming from another country and culture is even harder. It does take a special toughness and confidence to deal with that, especially since a lot of times you don't play a lot as a young player.
For me it's much more like a little kid rebelling. The minute I was told what to do at any age, I did the opposite. Hopefully I'll do that for the rest of my life. I come from the business side and Mark comes from the creative side, but every time a decision came up about Creep it was two emails, and we agreed. I've not had that ever with someone on the creative or the business side.
Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters. "I hate change," she said. "It's so . . . jangly." "Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said. "Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?"
Here's an idea: eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid's cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods, and ease up on the snacking. And don't act like you don't know this: eat more vegetables and fruits. Really, how difficult is this? Stop with the whining. Stop with the excuses. Act like an adult and stop eating like a television commercial. Grow up.
It was probably one of the things that gave me a sense of possibility and allowed for me to see beyond the small community that I existed within. You know, I was making friends with young Soviet kids. this is during perestroika. You know, there's bread lines and vodka lines. The entire social structure of what was then the Soviet Union was radically different from what we know today.
I think you have to embrace being a role model because you are in the public eye, and whether you like it or not, people are going to be affected by you positively or negatively, ... Public-wise, I really wouldnt do anything that would be detrimental to anybody else or to myself. And to a certain extent, I try to watch out and try not to do anything that would be bad for kids to see.
I'm most proud of my kids, for one, and my family and my parents. Outside of that - what am I proud of? I don't know. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something. And I'm doing some very decent work.
One of our priorities when doing "March" is to sort of undo what we feel is the disservice done by what we call the Nine Words Problem. Which is that most American kids, whatever they do learn about the movement, especially in school, is usually limited to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream." And so there's sort of a layer of unreality; there's not a sense of continuity.
I get letters from kids from all over the country. I always try to answer them because there were people I looked up to in my youth and just wanted to be in contact with. It's also important to realize that you find your role models in a lot of different places. I've never believed that your role models have to look like you. You can find them in all sort of colors, shapes and sizes.
It's true that the level of scientific knowledge among adults is very low, but that's not because there isn't a natural interest. I think most kids are fascinated by the natural world. I've often said that if you could quantify the mental power involved in all the dinosaur names correctly known and correctly spelled by 5-year-old kids in America, you could move any mountain on earth.
If friends are taking more from you than they're giving, it doesn't matter if they are in the throes of addiction. It does not matter if they are suicidal. It does not matter if they were nice to you when you were kids. It doesn't matter if you've told them things you've never told anybody else and only they can relate. If this person is draining you, this person is not right for you.
If you look at a farmer and his daily expenditure on existing energy services, it is much higher on an incremental delta basis. And then there is an emotional cost of not providing their kids with the right to educate. If you calculate these costs in economic terms and create a financing mechanism for them to buy it, the emotional delta cost is much higher compared to their household.
I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That's when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo.
I didn't think that and I didn't verbalize that to myself or within meetings that we ever had, but we wanted to make a hard-nosed, gritty, realistic spy thriller. Roger talked about using lenses. He shot hi-def, but using anamorphic lenses that he'd found from this warehouse. He was so thrilled with that. Him and Romain [Lacourbas] were just like kids in a toy store with their lenses.
The best pay off in the world is when someone comes up to you and says, 'your music has helped me with some pretty rough times through life. I don't know if I would still be here if it was for your music whether it be country music or heavy metal has done for me.' That's ultimately the biggest payoff for me. I hear it from young kids to military guys and military women to older folks.
I feel like hate and darkness get so much airtime. We need to give peace and love as much airtime as we can. We need to be teaching our kids that it's okay to love whoever you want to love, and it's okay to be who you want to be, and it's okay to feel that everybody should be treated equally and with respect. Such simple things that I don't know why it's hard for people to understand.
My upbringing was very un-Hollywood. I was born in New York and grew up on a ranch. I was never really smitten by the business in those days, never a fan type - just a basic kid watching TV. It wasn't like I was an insider. I was never really brought into the show business side of my father's life. I guess that's been a blessing and a downfall. But it's made my own work the initiation.
I think the idea that in a riddle there are two answers or two doors and that you have to pick the right one is almost sort of delightful to kids who are making so many choices every day and who often don't know for a while if they've made the right one. It's not as if you make a choice and then *ding* you have some sense of "oh, this is perfect and I'm happy" - it's never that simple.
I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.
Going to regular public high school and working and auditioning was really, really tough. I never really fit in and hit the stride that all the other kids were on. Instead of going out and hanging out with my friends at that age, I remember being in my bedroom and putting on like a Christina Aguilera tape and just like belting. And seeing if I could hit every single note just like her.
I was talking to a friend of mine who's a teacher in Iowa and, you know, she teaches kids - English is their second language, and they're scared that they're going to get sent home, their family's going to get broken up. Regardless of whether [Donald Trump] does it or not, whether it's true or not, the rhetoric creates a climate of fear and tension, and that's not good for the country.
I don't mind the homosexuality. I understand it. Nevertheless, goddamn, I don't think you glorify it on public television, homosexuality, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates.
The first thing that jumps out in my mind is David versus Goliath. That's one of the first stories we ever learn as kids. That's one of the most inspirational stories about courage. David stood in the face of terrible odds and defeated the giant. I love reading that story to my boys. Being courageous is doing something isn't easy or fun but you do it because it's the right thing to do.
As I got to know the people of the Civil Rights Movement, I realized... I am the hopeful black woman who was denied her right to vote. I am the caring white supporter killed on the front lines of freedom. I am the unarmed black kid who maybe needed a hand, but instead was given a bullet. I am the two fallen police officers murdered in the line of duty. 'Selma' has awakened my humanity.
As I was a kid, I had a bunch of musicians, they always told me that I should listen to all styles of music and try to play all styles and be authentic at it, if I can, because you never know who's gonna call you. This was coming from fellow horn players who would get the call to play with different types of people. Since I was a kid, that was just something I was always interested in.
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
I am a hopeless romantic. And I won't stop till I get it right. I don't think I'm unlike a lot of people. I am just someone who is trying to find that mate, and I think it's a really hard thing to do. And I'm not willing to stay somewhere where I am really not happy. And I am not willing to pretend I am for the kid's sake or so that I don't have to go through another public humiliation.
Learning that aesthetic as a kid - seeing those photos - made me think that that's what photos are supposed to look like. I never understood snapshots. I was looking at them like, "This is horrible; that's not what a picture is supposed to look like." I was taught by these photos. So when I picked up the camera, though I had never done it before, I kind of already knew what I was doing.
One thing I'd like to just keep on doing is I want to educate people about animal behavior and about autism. I've been doing autism talks for the last 20 years and there still are people out there that do not want to, they can't recognize that these sensory problems are real. That, for some of these kids when that fire alarm goes off, that really hurts the ears, it's a really real thing.
Well, when I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten year old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old... I think! And I always wanted to be a certain, a bit similar to that. But I didn't want to sell pizza.
I just started asking my friends if they had noticed. None of them - feminists, mothers, daughters - noticed until I pointed it out. Then I decided to bring it up within the industry. I knew a lot of people, so I'd say, "Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in kids movies?" when I met a director, a producer, whatever. And they said, "Oh, but that's not true anymore."
I like the new shoe designers. Not all of them - there are really bad ones too. But I go to the colleges with these kids for lectures, as an honorary professor or whatever, and this Chinese girl I like very much who I give the award to says to me, "You don't know how much you inspired me to do shoes." And I'm glad that I convey that kind of desire to people when they see my bloody shoes.
There's ten of us, we've been best friends for thirty years. Ten guys. And their wives, and their kids, are all family now. I'm not big on keeping up on the phone, none of us are. Some guys I won't talk to for two months and then you pick up the phone and hear, "So, anyway." There's no guilt or where have you been? or what's been going on? or why haven't we talked? There's an ease to it.
As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you climb in bed and read for hours and hours, and the book itself is this charged magical object. Later, when writing becomes your job, it's tied up with ego and all kinds of worry, and it's not always easy to get to that state of pure escape.
We didn't have reruns back then, so when the show ended we thought it was over. I'm overwhelmed by how long the show has been popular and by how many people still love it today. I still watch the reruns and just laugh! Here in Mount Airy they show the Andy Griffith Show at 3:30 in the afternoons and they call it "Andy After School", but the show wasn't just for kids, it was for everyone.
I was a gay kid in high school in the late '90s, and I was in theater club. I was never a thespian. I was much more of a lighting guy or a backstage guy. Because I wanted to do something easy for the rest of my life, I thought, "Maybe I'll go and apply to colleges that specialize in theater set design. I'll do that. That's what I want to do". With theater, really, I'd be around the gays.
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated - a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way - that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.
I am not a huge fan of the Celtic Tiger; I was so glad that you could see people being prosperous, that you didn't see people begging, that the city started looking good, that people had jobs. But it was almost like if you have such a hard time for so long, then you turn around and give a kid a check for a million quid, they're going to go nuts. And we went a bit nuts, we went up our ass.
I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.
I think fashion is really opened me up as a person. All eyes are on you when you do the shows and when you do the photo shoots. You have to know how to act around people. I used to be a shy kid in school. I didn't know how to interact with people and now I find it so easy. Fashion has really done something great for me and it's really changed me as a person. I've changed my style as well.
For sure I see so much in Sudan that is wonderful, normal life - young entrepreneurs starting up NGO projects, kids mucking around and being kids. Everything else that happens in normal life in any part of the world, and we never get that in our media coverage. We only talk about Sudan once it's in crisis, so we end up with a distorted sense of what daily life is like for a lot of people.
I think all kids feel that their lives are tough, and that they've, been given an unfair shake for one reason or another. So I think there's a lot of kids who relate to my story. They also relate to the fact that I got out of it. And I tell them that my refuge from all that was books - the library was my safe place. And the art room was my safe place because there I knew what I was doing.
Looking back, I feel like I was really young, and at the time I didn't think that I was that young. It was extremely traumatic and awful and horrible. At the same time, it turned out for the best. I'm glad that I'm not there. I'm glad that it didn't happen when I was 50. I'm glad I didn't have kids. And I got that out of the way. Hopefully. Like, that's probably not going to happen again.
In the culture of America, in a free culture, you get what you celebrate. And in this culture, we have two obsessions, become a group that becomes a group that celebrates sports heroes and entertainment heroes. There's no room left for kids to see even a little bit of the opportunities to really, really get excited about becoming an inventor, an engineer, or a scientist, a problem solver.
When I care about something, I care about something. I think I have an obligation as an American to - and as a citizen, as - as a human being, to help others. Smoking is going to kill a billion people this century. I've put six hundred million dollars from my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies from getting kids to smoke and convincing adults that it's not in their health.
Happy Families. What's that all about, eh? A bloody busted flush is what it is. You surround yourself with other people so the night doesn't seem quite so dark. Shout down the sound of the wind with arguments about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. Best not to kid yourself. Best not to give any hostages to fortune. You're on your own in the end. Always. Where else would you want to be?
Be your kid's collaborative partner, but also be a collaborative partner with the folks at school. Schools can be pretty unilateral too. Show them you know how to collaborate. Show them this is not about power. Let them know detentions and suspensions and paddling don't solve the problems that are affecting kids' lives. Those problems can be identified and solved but not by being punitive.
I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.
First of all, women inherently, I think, are quite capable of having lots of balls in the air. And so, like, it's all those skills you use; you analyze the problem, figure out your tools, and then go at it piece by piece.... It's like what you have to do in the morning to get your kids out the door [if you're a parent]. The skills are, I believe, the same. The patience issues are the same.