I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.
I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.
Manchester United could have any goalkeeper in the world. I was a 23-year-old kid from New Jersey who, from an early age, had to cope with Tourette's Syndrome, a brain disorder that can trigger speech and facial tics, vocal outbursts and obsessive compulsive behavior.
When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.
Growing up, I was the awkward, chubby kid. I had a few close friends, but I was the first one to be bullied.
I remember going with my mom to a random garage sale as a kid and thinking what a cool treasure hunt that whole world was. Only to transition as an adult to think, 'What a gross place that really is.'
A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the wheel, looking out at me.
When we were filming, I thought that I was Peter Pan, you know? I thought I was the coolest kid in the world, so I wound up being the coolest kid in the world.
The biggest thing you can give a kid is self-esteem, so that they're not shy to do different things.
I really tried out for the part of Harry Potter, but they ended up picking me for the part of the enemy of Harry. Actually it is really fun playing the bad kid because it just has so many interesting qualities to it. And Daniel Radcliffe and I get along really well off set so it's really fun filming.
I was raised going to the movies with my grandmother as a kid. And then I'd come home, and my best friend and I would act out the films that we saw.
I thought I was a good kid.
Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you're a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you're at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it's your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.
I never satisfied that kid but I think he and I have made a deal now.
I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'
Gosh, all a kid has to do these days is spit straight and he gets forty-thousand dollars to sign.
He was always sort of a scrappy little kid wasn't he? A bit of a fighter?
I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong.
I was a nerdy punk-rock kid.
You have kids growing up in some of the worst circumstances financially, living in some of the worst ghettos, and they succeed. They succeed because an adult figure, typically a mother, maybe a grandmother, nourishes the kid, supports the kid, protects the kid, encourages the kid to succeed. It's as if the environment never happened.
I watched TV religiously when I was a kid, but nowadays - with the Internet - there's so many people writing about TV on the Internet, that everything's sort of under a magnifying glass.
I've kissed in the rain so many times. I think one of my first kisses was in the rain. It was in Washington, D.C., with some kid named Dash, in eighth grade. It was in the rain.
If bad things happen to you as a kid, it's hard for you to succeed as an adult.
When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'
If you can get a twelve year-old kid to go listen to Thelonius Monk, what more do you want? Do you want a big pile of cash, too? That's a home run for me.
December used to be very difficult for me. For many years, I fought the transition to the new year, was generally exhausted at the end of the year, and just wanted to hide. I described myself as a 'cranky Jewish kid who felt left out by Christmas.'
Sometimes, comedy feels like the kid brother of drama, trying to get attention by being the class jokester. But it's actually really hard to tell a story while also making people laugh. It's like trying to do two jobs at once.
I'm a very outgoing person. I'm always happy, I'm one of those people who are always smiling. If somebody described me to somebody else, they'd say the kid with the curly hair with the big smile on his face. I get along with everybody.
I had a fairly regular childhood. I was a pretty boring kid. I didn't do much. I was always thinking, but I didn't really say a lot.
I like to go home early, that's my thing. My idea of a pub crawl lasts from midday until 5 P.M., then I can go home, play with my kid, have tea and go to bed.
As a kid I watched television 24 hours a day and loved every minute of it. The two shows that always make me laugh and are therefore my favourites are The Dick Van Dyke Show and Fawlty Towers.
Why thrust your kid into that? You try to protect them from all the bad people out there.
When I was a kid, I was more interested in beating up boys on the playground than practicing music.
I fell in love with the ocean when I was just a little kid, four or five years old, I was a junior ranger, I was going out and doing intertidal stuff, walking around and sticking my finger in my first sea anemone and picking up starfish and all that. It gripped me when I was young.
What adults don't always understand is that to a kid, a comic book is like a movie. My Marvel comics took my imagination to other places - other galaxies.
I like to be flamboyant, play characters, wear make-up, play dress up. I was doing that since I was a kid.