I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...
Ever since I started acting, I've always spoken to our people about identity. I've spoken to kids, telling them: "Where do I get my strength to push through the barriers to get me where I'm at today? It's my culture and my traditions, you know?
If I'm president, some day, young kids will look at the world differently. They will say, I could be president some day. They couldn't have said that before I came along. The world will see the United States in a different context, as a country of true opportunity for all.
Near my house in Los Angeles is a waterfall. I love to take the wife and kids, but it's also near a sketchy neighborhood. So there's a lot of gang members that hang out at the waterfall. It's like somebody took an Ansel Adams photo and then put a Cypress Hill video inside it.
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.
Aside from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat.
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.
As a kid, I'd go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I'd be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.
My parents were so poor when I was a kid, I never went anywhere. I take our youngsters with us because I don't know anything that teaches them so much.
I was always casting about for role models as a kid and the Star Trek was always available via reruns and also full of possibilities. I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable. I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him. Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way... it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things.