Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When Veronica Mars was canceled, the following season of pilots for The CW had been announced, and one was Gossip Girl. I read it, and I knew I was sort of old to play any of the kids. I called Dawn Ostroff -- who was the head of The CW at the time -- and said, 'Hey, I did so much narration on Veronica Mars, can I narrate this show? And she said, 'Hey, that's a very good idea.' They knew I had a younger voice, they liked me and they knew I'd show up for work, and I guess that was all I really needed. It was so clear to me how sassy and catty she needed to be.
I know exactly what that movie's [Brokeback mountain] about. I can't define it; it doesn't tie up in a perfect bow. But it's about adolescence. It's about what it feels like - this isn't meant as a criticism, but like things I didn't relate to, which were high school movies. Where I'd watch it and I'd be like, "Well, am I like the kid that nobody likes? Or am I like the person who everybody [likes]?" I couldn't [tell]. I was like quantifying, putting me in a box. "This is my personality at that age" and "I'm this kind of person" just felt like bullshit to me.
The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned -- seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, 'OK, I don't want to deal with these people ever again.' But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I've met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We've talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I've made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?
Where once such devices were relegated to appropriate times, now they've become necessities. The other day I watched a kid come off the school bus listening to music on his headphones, oblivious to the traffic zooming past him. And I can't even begin to count the times I've thought pet owners were talking to their dogs while taking them for a walk when, in reality, they were blabbing on their cell phones. It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past, ... It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience as opposed to just when you're jogging.
I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.
Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, 'Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.' Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.
When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Universal Monsters movies of the 1930's and the 1940's. I loved movies like The Wolfman (1941) and Dracula (1931). I really wanted to be in those movies. Eventually I started nagging my parents about it, and it turned from, "I wanna be in a monster movie! I wanna be in a monster movie!" to "I just wanna be in a movie." So I think my parents just thought that if they took me to one audition I'd see how boring it was and I wouldn't wanna do it. But I ended up getting the part, and I got a bunch of roles after that as well.
There's an evidence from a number of studies which show that where you grow up and the age at which you move to the suburbs or to a neighborhood that in general seems to have better conditions can really affect a child's outcomes. The kids who moved at young ages are dramatically better as adults. They're earning 30 percent more, they're 27 percent more likely to go to college, relative to the kids who stayed in the high poverty public housing projects. And so there's clear scientific evidence that you can change kids' outcomes just based on where they grow up.
We're in an era where they've sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there's no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there's strain, you know? There's a lot of pressure, things can't be perfect, parents can't be perfect all the time. There's a divorce, there's money issues, whatever. People work, so you don't always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy.
I like playing at public schools. I like when there's more of a diverse audience. I'll play wherever people want to hear my music, and I'll be glad and grateful for the opportunity, but I'd rather not play for a bunch of white privileged kids. I'm not meaning that in a disrespectful way; you go where people want to hear your music. So if that's where people want to hear me play, I'm glad to play for them. But I'd rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.
People assume that because I'm a celebrity and have this platform that I always know what I'm talking about. I guess I don't always know what I'm talking about because I'm a kid who's trying to figure it out amid all the chaos of the world at large, and also the chaos of having this voice and responsibility. At the same time, this voice and responsibility has been the biggest blessing because I'm able to create change just by posting something on Instagram. That's really amazing. I can't believe that I get to have that megaphone and I get to decide how to use it.
When I was a little bitty kid, my aunt showed me how to play a little boogie. It took me years. I had to play the left-hand part with two hands, because my hands was so little. Then as I grew up and I learned how to play the left-hand part with one hand, she showed me how to play the right-hand part, and et cetera. My Uncle Joe showed me how to play a little bit different boogie stuff. I had people in my family that was professional musicians, but I just wasn't interested in what they did. I wasn't very open-minded to a lot of music that I'd be more open to today.
We've now got a group of young people in this country who for all practical purposes are American. They grew up here. They've gone to school here. They don't know anything other than being American kids. But their parents may have brought them here without all the proper paperwork - might have brought them here when they were three, might have brought them here when they were five. And so, lo and behold, by the time they finish school, and they're ready to go to college, they find out they can't go to college and, in fact, their status as Americans are threatened.
We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.
I don't think it's very healthy to hold people to idealized views. I think that's a certain stage in life, something kids do. You have to go through that idealistic phase with your parents, but at a certain point, you need to see people as just people. And everyone's pretty similar. I think if you're in the showbusiness, like any high-stakes business, the highs and lows can make you a manic-depressive person, if you weren't that way to start with. 'Cause it's just so crazy on your psyche. A lot of it has to do with people thinking they're greater than someone else.
If the president of the country is not actually saying something, allowing equality to happen, how could you expect to counsel kids not to bully other kids? If they're not seeing that their society sees gay people as equals, how could you tell them what they're doing is wrong? With all this stuff going on, with the "Don't ask, don't tell" and things like that, we are second-class citizens, definitely. It just seems to me that it's hypocritical for us as a culture to say, "Bullying is a terrible thing," when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.
I think in that context, when a generation of kids is that ignorant of their recent history, it does a good job of showing what the Pistols were standing for. It's current and it's in the air, partly because I think nothing contemporary is as extreme or as strongly stated as what The Sex Pistols were able to do in their time, in the '70s. I think the reason to [make the film] is that their ideas are still alive: the defense of the right to be an individual, and questioning everything you read, and questioning all the information that's bombarded increasingly at you.
Narratives that were taken for granted when I was a kid are still there, but they don't have the same depth and fervor anymore. Even the makers of the propaganda don't fully believe the propaganda. The surface structures are more frozen than they ever were, but the core is hollowing out, and it's becoming very fragile. People don't believe in the system anymore. But they're still going along with it because, one, they don't know what else is possible, they don't even know anything else is possible. Secondly, everybody else is doing it. So they go through the motions.
I'm thinking of writing a children's story about a leaf on a tree who arrogantly insists he's a self-made, independent leaf. Then one day a fierce wind blows him off his branch and to the ground below. As his life slowly ebbs away, he looks up at the magnificent old tree that had been his home and realizes that he had never been on his own. His entire life he had been part of something bigger and more beautiful than anything he could have imagined. In a blinding flash, he awakens from the delusion of self. Then an arrogant, self-centered kid rakes him up and bags him.
I was asked by the National Institute of Health to be their scientific discussant on the effects of these drug [Ritalin] at a big conference they held. Beforehand, I reviewed all of the important literature on the issue. Even with experiments on animals. When they're given these drugs they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. We make good caged animals with these drugs. And we make good caged kids by knocking their spontaneity out of them. And, Michael, the other thing is that these drugs enforce obsessive behavior.
Before I even knew what stand up was, I tried to make people laugh at school because that was how I made friends, so I think that's how I got drawn into comedy and obviously I was just some kid at school being silly, so the first time I saw a professional comedian and how smooth and funny the person was I totally got into standup and I would say obviously Richard Pryor was the guy. He's the greatest of all time and then George Carlin, Sam Kinison, Bill Cosby. It's so weird to bring up his name now but leaving out his off-stage antics... you could learn a lot from him.
The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can't imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman, but whatever. I think, what I always tell kids when they get out of class and ask, 'What should I do now?' I always say, 'Keep a low overhead. You're not going to make a lot of money.' And the next thing I say: 'Don't live with a person who doesn't respect your work.' That's the most important thing—that's more important than the money thing. I think those two things are very valuable pieces of information.
Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don't even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier; and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it's our foods... Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff.
As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe.
I didn't abandon my studies. Because I was, through no - clarify this. Through no particular genius of my own, I was the first person from Libertyville Public High School to attend Harvard, not because I was smarter than anyone or better than anyone, but no one had ever applied before. It was like University of Illinois, a fine institution, was the sort of the upper echelon of places where kids went from that school. And so I felt sort of a duty to myself and my peers to continue with those studies, and to continue to, intellectually arm myself for my coming struggles.
The principle factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I couldn't stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I have never kept one of my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, odd bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I'm still as fond of drawings as when I was a kid - and that was a long time ago - but, surprising as it may seem, I never thought about the money I would receive for my drawings. I simply drew them.
At 36, I think I was pretty happy [actually], but here's the thing that I think happens... you're expected to be somewhere at 36, and there's that feeling: At this particular age - especially for women for God's sake - you should have this many kids, you should have a husband, or you should have this... and it's overwhelming. So that perpetuates the feeling that no matter where you are, no matter how much money you have, no matter how many kids you have, no matter how great they're doing, whether you want kids or not, married or not, it doesn't matter - you feel behind.
We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends.
I was an eight-year-old kid when I watched the first Apollo Moon Landing way back in 1969 and there was something about that moment that really stuck in my head. I'd always been interested in space and flying and I was building model rockets and model airplanes, but something about that moment, I can remember like it was yesterday watching the Apollo Lunar Lander approach the surface of the Moon and then later watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take the first steps on the Moon, and something that day started the dream for me that, hey, I want to be like those guys.
When someone who is known as a comedic actor goes to drama, it often doesn't work out, because they really just chose wrong, I think - or maybe they're just not good actors. For me it's important making that transition seamless, and not a huge shock and jumping into cold water. It doesn't feel like I'm trying to shock you or anything. I'm just saying, "I'm a different actor than you thought I was. Don't put me in a box. I'm not just some kid running around screaming curse words." I have other tastes besides comedy. I love comedy, but I love dramatic movies just as much.
There’s no way that Michael Jackson or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand droople billion dollars and then there’s people starving. There’s no way! There’s no way that these people should own planes and there people don’t have houses. Apartments. Shacks. Drawers. Pants! I know you’re rich. I know you got 40 billion dollars, but can you just keep it to one house? You only need ONE house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room?! It just don’t make sense to me. It don’t.
Historically different groups find different things in each comics, as with *X-Men*. Gay readers find parallels to living a closeted lifestyle or choosing to come out and be openly gay. Black readers find a relevance to their lives growing up in America as a black guy. Picked-on brainy kids find a metaphor for being an outsider. It's a simple enough, and direct enough metaphor that it has different shades for different people. And so each reader to some degree gets out of it what they bring to it. That's one of the things I think that makes *X-Men* such a strong property.
A lot of our fellow liberals ... seem to me rather to doom themselves to futility in public affairs because the won't recognize that there's a zone of natural affection midway between the inner, or family one, and the outer, or all-humanity one. I suppose they are somehow short of a zone themselves and they seem to get vexed... The common man knows better, just as he'd know better if some philosopher told him he ought not to make invidious distinctions by feeding his own children in preference to others. But of course he can't explain; he just ... goes on feeding the kids.
The difference between a good educator and a great educator is that the former figures out how to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions, whereas the latter figures out how to change whatever gets in the way of doing right by kids. 'But we've always...', 'But the parents will never...', 'But we can't be the only school in the area to...' - all such protestations are unpersuasive to great educators. If research and common sense argue for doing things differently, then the question isn't whether to change course but how to make it happen.
The reality is that there are half a billion kids in India, in villages, who have a pre-determined life. If they're very lucky and they're a gifted athlete, maybe they can compete for the Olympics, or maybe they can get into the military. But if you're not a gifted athlete, then you're going to end up working for your family and you're going to perpetuate what your family is. It's gotten to the point, in villages, where there's no hope. And the first spark of hope is when you ask yourself the question,"What gift did God give me that I can develop and use to better my life?"
Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.
Our "society" is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she's exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation, further, enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual by being a "rugged individualist", a loner, equating non-co-operation and solitariness with individuality.
For me, difference is beautiful, there is not only one beauty, and in a collection I always like to show mixed directions. When you look at people or things, there are all these codes and standards that come into play around what is considered ugly or beautiful, and I've always questioned that. When you're a kid, you're not conditioned, you don't see perversity, there's a state of innocence where everything is beautiful, you see differently....I am lucky because I am doing now what I dreamt of doing as a child, and I like to think that I've retained a childlike state of mind.
During the Reagan eighties, the idea that money was a good thing - it was good to be rich; that wealth was a reflection of your character. We see this today in perceptions of Donald Trump: the idea that money is an expression of success and even goodness. I compare that with my dad's generation, where the American Dream was about giving your kids a better life, but not just in material terms. The American Dream was also about doing something good in the world. The home was at the center of the dream, but home also represented community, shelter, and stability for your family.
I wanted to become an actor. I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is one of the main drama schools in London where you go when you are older. But I was doing the junior one when I was a kid. And some friends there had agents. I was fourteen and I was like, "I want an agent! It sounds awesome!" I had no idea what that was. I thought those guys looked like men in black. They were hanging around in suits all the time. So I luckily got a very good agent in London and started auditioning. And then when I was 16, I got my first film and I've been working ever since.
In high school, my first thing ever was I played Tony in West Side Story when I was about 17. I was a really shy kid and I just like forced myself to learn how to sing this one month because I loved West Side Story so much and I somehow managed to get the role. I had an afro and glasses, and the guy who cast me goes, "All right, the first thing to go is the afro and the next thing, I'm going to buy you contacts and we're going to get you..." So he kind of molded me into what it had to - that's still probably the hardest role I've every played in anything, the most taxing role.
I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.
When I was growing up, I didn't really know much about being popular or cliques or anything like that. In elementary school and middle school, you start to kind of realize what it's all about. There are cool kids, and then there's you, and you're just trying to figure out where you fit in.I learned a lot about acceptance and rejection,Those are the themes that you'll find spread throughout my music and weaved in throughout all of the lyrics. I really know what it's like to be accepted, and I also know what it's like to be rejected. And those are lessons I learned in Wyomissing.
So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the boys. Then those men are taught to be winners, or at least, losers that hate themselves.
If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.
Everyone who is in a financial situation argues with his or her spouse. Many people argue with their children. Or they lose the respect of their children. I, fortunately, was not in that case, but I have friends, who've opened up to me, and their children turned on them! Not because they're bad kids, but because they say, "Well, you don't have the money that I need to do such-and-such a thing." You recede from the world. Because you don't want to deal with people. You don't want to socialize, because you have this deep, dark secret, which is absolutely, y'know, hollows you out.
This is my year of transition from what I'm calling the second phase of my life to the third phase of my life. And I wanted to pass it along. What I mean by that is, in the first days of your life you're dependent on others and you learn. You're basically a kid, depending on your parents. In the second phase of your life, you're working and others are dependent on you and you're trying to be successful. And then when you go to the third phase of your life it's no longer as much of a kick to be successful. There's a natural, instinctual desire to help other people be successful.
The bad things the U.S. health care system are that our financing of health care is really a moral morass in the sense that it signals to the doctors that human beings have different values depending on their income status. For example, in New Jersey, the Medicaid program pays a pediatrician $30 to see a poor child on Medicaid. But the same legislators, through their commercial insurance, pay the same pediatrician $100 to $120 to see their child. How do physicians react to it? If you phone around practices in Princeton, Plainsboro, Hamilton - none of them would see Medicaid kids.
I think it's a sign of a gotcha political system that's looking to take down public interest candidates that they make a big deal out of a comment to a parent concerned about the exposure of young children to Wi-Fi. Now it turns out that Wi-Fi is actually untested. A large study by the NIH [National Institutes of Health] released a month ago raised serious questions about whether kids ought to be exposed, whether young children ought to be exposed to Wi-Fi. And you know, I'm not saying they should or they shouldn't but that this should be studied. Absolutely it should be studied.
And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. "Ordered" eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. ... All people who live their lives on a diet are suffering. If you can accept your natural body weight and not force it to beneath your body's natural, healthy weight, then you can live your life free of dieting, of restriction, of feeling guilty every time you eat a slice of your kid's birthday cake.
