I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.
The reason I know about 'Tomb Raider' is from when I was researching 'Elephant. ' It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn't know.
I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.
I'm not religious. It's an issue, 'cause I've got two little kids, and I feel you can't grow up without knowledge of religion.
I don't want to see kids in America being scared because they're hearing people on television and the radio saying really ugly xenophobic and racist things.
So are all the kids on the East Coast repeating school next year? Get ready to see a lot of hairy eighth graders. Storm brain drain.
And yet 50 percent of the kids who start high school in the United States today do not finish high school.
My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
As I've gotten older, I've felt I have more authority on that subject. I think the conversation needs to be reframed. What I hate - a lot of conversations about choosing not to have children tend to be couched in these superficial terms, or kind of glib, "I'd rather have a Porsche" or "I forgot to have kids. " No you didn't.
There is such pressure on kids these days to be the best at everything.
I'm tired of leaving my wife at home with no nanny and no cook to take care of four kids by herself.
The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page. . . Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger.
It truly is a little intimidating to go speak at a middle school. Sure, on one hand the kids are only around 13 years old, but on the other hand, merely going back there reactivates the dorky, miserable feeling of being that age again. It isn't easy. As soon as I arrived I could almost feel the braces on my teeth, the don't-look-at-me slouch of my shoulders, the feathered wings of my bangs.
Let's face it, 80 percent of the work I do my kids can't see.
As for developing a writing style'I would say that I tried to copy the pacing of the old movies I loved as a kid.
My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends' parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we'll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.
I was in a choir as a kid. It was from those early days that my outlook on harmonies and arrangements were nurtured. I always took that with me, even on the earliest Bad Religion record, which strangely was only about six years after that.
I assume the only reason we have them is so that white people feel relevant in sports. Because other than that the only thing the winter Olympics show me is which country has more rich white kids. What's it cost to go skiing - $900 a day? I can't believe that's not more popular in the inner cities.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
I don't want to force anything on anyone. I'm not trying to bust you over the head and make you buy this record or this song or whatever. I'm presenting it to you so you can take it in. You know, it's like trying to force a kid to eat broccoli. If I present it as trees that make your muscles grow, my son is like, 'I'm down with getting muscles. '