When I'm around the kids I feel like I act the most grown-up just because you're supposed to. And I say things, like every other day, that remind me of my own parents.
Looking back, I realize that this period of my life has irrevocably come to a close; my happy-go-lucky, carefree schooldays are gone forever. I don't even miss them. I've outgrown them. I can no longer just kid around, since my serious side is always there.
[Ocean's Thirteen] is a great group, and it was an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh. But mainly? It was shot in L.A. and I want to be next to my kids. So I've been doing everything that has to do with being next to them, close to them.
I don't strive for balance. I just try to get through my to-do list, with my kids' homework being at the top of it, and then try to prepare for the next audition or whatever scene I'm shooting next. Balance.
If you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids.
I moved around a lot as a kid, and when you're always entering new places at that age, you kind of have to learn how to adapt yourself, and I felt a really powerful way to do that was to make people laugh.
Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it.
I actually like taking a mic and plugging it into an amp and giving it to a kid to see what they do, 'cause they flip out. They're way more in touch with their voices than we give them credit for.
Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, "Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!" But as I've gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there's a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn't actually account for the world. As I've gotten older, I've also become sensitive to the ways - to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?
I really love sharing my gift with others. At the same time, I'm just a normal kid having fun and that's what life is all about-having fun at the same time as helping people.
Libraries have a special role to play in our knowledge economy. Your institutions have been and should be a place where parents and children come to read together and learn together. We should take our kids there more.