I was lucky to come from a difficult area. It teaches you not just about football but also life. There were lots of kids from different races and poor families. People had to struggle to get through the day.
My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don't smell, but I remember my brother's did when we were kids.
I'm human, I'm not perfect. I make mistakes all the time, but I guess my job is to keep those mistakes to myself, which I'm already fine doing and just try to be the best I can be for those kids.
The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.
You think about when you're kids and see these guys on TV, and now you're in the same clubhouse as Chipper Jones and Bobby Cox.
It's hard being a girl. There are a lot of body image issues that come up and I think the best thing we can do for our kids is lead by example.
In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.
I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.
I'm an optimistic guy. I'm one of those big dreamers. I'm one of those kids with that annoying imagination.
But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.
Let's be honest, I don't think anyone ever wants to settle down in Hollywood - it's a place you go to work. And once you've hit it, you get out of there as soon as you can. It's definitely not a place you want to get married and have kids.
I don't swear much; I've taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!
I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
As a kid, I was really into performing. I would do choruses, I would do musicals, whatever it was. And then, as a teenager, I got into an acting class at SUNY Purchase for gifted kids, and that really turned me on to material beyond musicals, Sam Shepard, and Christopher Durang plays.
I love little kids looking up to me, young players looking up to me, respecting me.
I connect with kids easily. They bring out the maternal side in me.
In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.
Get to know your kids' minds and how they think.
It's so important to that we go into the public schools and we feed all of the kids something that is really good for them.
Gay kids need to stop killing themselves because they are made to feel worthless by cruel and relentless bullying.
People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
It's nice to know you're working on something that will mean something to kids.
I don't live in New York or California. I'm in the grocery store, at the park with my kids, and I'm a normal person. I'm feeding my chickens and agonizing about my next book!
Alan Cumming was such a fun guy to watch. I remember he has a song in the first 'Spy Kids' movie, and when Danny Elfman came to set, they were working on the song.
Kids these days don't know as much about music as they think they do.
Acting was not on my agenda. It just happened by chance. I always wanted to be involved in wildlife protection or maybe surrounded by kids. I love animals and children.
If you look where kids are spending time on the Net, they may have all the information in the world, but they're not accessing it.
The easiest way to convince my kids that they don't really need something is to get it for them.
We play tag and kickball almost every day. It's one of the ways that I've figured out how to spend some fun quality time with my kids while getting exercise.
For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.
I find young kids. I enjoy coaching and enjoy making them better players.
I've been in elementary education for years and my belief is that Christmas pageants in schools are little more than conditioning kids for the Christian religion.
Most kids will not volunteer to eat veggies. At times you must step up to the plate and enforce the rule of authority as a parent.
Parents shouldn't assume children are made out of sugar candy and will break and collapse instantly. Kids don't. We do.
I want to have kids. I want to get married. That is still very important to me.
The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, is that a lot of Latin kids, Latino kids, in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes.
