I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.
I didn't know that I'd like it this much, coaching both boys and coming out all the time and seeing how excited they are to play hockey. It reminds you of when you were that age and you wanted to be out on the ice.
I was really proud to be in that show. I will never forget. I got the script to 'Millie,' and I'm flipping through the script and saying, 'Boy, I have some lines... I have a big song.' I was 25 years old and had never been on Broadway before. I got to the end of the script, and I was really nervous and excited. I realized I had a lot to do.
I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.
I don't ever think of myself as coming from a particular class because my father was working class but made his living as a newspaper foreign correspondent - someone of no fixed abode, as he used to say - who was as comfortable dining with the Mountbattens in India as he was having a pint with the boys. He was very gregarious.
I always wanted to play a boxer because some of my favorite films, as a boy, were those great boxing movies, like 'Raging Bull', 'Rocky', 'The Set Up', 'Fat City and Hard Times'. I just loved those films.
My mother couldn't take having three boys. She was extremely jumpy, to say the least. Any noise startled her. The sound of a pot dropping on the ground could make her hit the ceiling.
I think every parent knows that, like, boys and girls are different. And we just don't take that into account in schools on those things like required reading lists. 'Cause that was my experience, say, with my son, who had to read 'Little House on the Prairie' when he was in third grade.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues.
I have one good girlfriend and then most of my friends are guys. Which I love, because they're just like so easygoing and I love to play like Xbox and just chill out when I'm not working, so boys are probably the way to go for me.
Wherever we roll, it didn't really matter, chicks would come to me no matter what. Even before anything. But a lot of the time when it doesn't happen, you have more fun anyway, because you can hang out with your boys.
I would love to have twins - a girl and a boy - but who knows if that would happen. It would be my ideal situation. Wham, bam, be done with it.
I trained my son to be a puppeteer since he was a little boy.
I definitely went through my magic phase. I think all little boys do at some point or another - they get fascinated by magic tricks.
I know throughout my childhood, there were many times I couldn't stand being a 'Jr.' I wouldn't want anybody else to go through that. If we'd had a boy, he wouldn't have been another Freddie Prinze.
I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'
Certainly, when I was a boy, people liked to believe that lawyers were kind of pillars of goodness of the likes of Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
I think it's great for my boys to have a girl in the house, just to understand at least a little bit about what makes a woman tick - not that I can certainly figure that out, because I can't.
I'm a small-town boy who comes from a traditional family on a tiny island called Belitung. I may not know where I'm going, but I'll always know where to come home to.
For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.
I don't mind a little Sturm und Drang. When I was doing 'Riding in Cars With Boys,' I wouldn't smile at anybody, because my character, Bev, was angry at the world. I'm the opposite. Inside my head I'd be like, God, I'll explain to you at the end of shooting that I'm not this person.
While I was growing up, all the boys used to be my buddies. I never got that special kind of attention from them, and I was the tomboy around. Although I've become an actress today, I still have those traits.
To my mum, I owe security in a very insecure young life. We lived in about 10 different places because of my father's chequered career, and she always made me feel a sense of consistency and security. I was a well-mothered boy.
Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.
When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
Islam tells us every girl and boy should be educated. I don't know why the Taliban have forgotten it.
People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to tour with the Beastie Boys and watched almost every set they played on all those dates. Why not? You do your set and then you get to see the Beasties play? Best deal in town.
My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid.
When we were trying to get 'Jersey Boys' off the ground, I'd get, 'The Four Seasons? Who's going to care? There's the Beatles, there's the Rolling Stones.' But people know those stories. Here was a story no one knew.
I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.
Boys are so much less mature than girls as it is.
As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.
The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.
At the beginning of my career I was going through a really weird phase of dressing in boys clothes. I would only wear one American Apparel T-shirt and shorts and brogues the whole year round. Not the same T-shirt, obviously, but one style of American Apparel T-shirt. I think I was going through a tomboy stage.
