We always reference kids but very rarely ask their opinion. Our inexperience might be what gives us the ability to teach our elders something, due to the fact that we are not jaded or cynical.
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else.
We all know people who have worse fates. What do I have to complain about for Christ's sake? I have a beautiful wife and kids, and all this music, kids are paying my bills.
When I was kid, I remember playing 'Vogue' by Madonna over and over and over again. And ah, you know, something about the beat was really cool, and Madonna, visually, was on TV all the time and I thought she was just so beautiful.
Looking back, now, I realize that you only ever need one person who lights up that way when you enter a room. One person is all it takes to give a kid confidence.
The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.
Our kids grew up here [in the White House]. Some of our best friends have been made here in this place. There have been moments that were highlights for us - that - you know, are going to be hard to duplicate.
I had something to do, which most kids really need. Something they can look forward to - a goal, a purpose to work towards. Something to achieve. Keeps them out of trouble.
The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again. It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid. It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I'm terrible at writing overtly political poems.
If you can look back and say, "The economy's better. Our security's better. The environment's better. Our kids' education is better," if you can say that you've made things better, then considering all the challenges out there, you should feel good. But I'm the first to acknowledge that I did not crack the code in terms of reducing this partisan fever.
I think anybody who's famous has to deal with their fame in their own way, and I dealt with it by making a film about a kid who's looking out into the world of celebrity obsession.
Kids win this'n'that every day. Thousands of them. One out of a hundred fights professionally. One out of a thousand's worth watchin', one out of a million's worth coffee and doughnuts.