You dream of your first NFL start when you're a little kid, playing football in the backyard, but until you get there, you never know what to expect.
If we can, like, be in the backyard playing baseball, I'd be the happiest kid in the world.
'Star Wars' was everything for me. As a little kid, you get to see the movies only once or twice, but playing with the toys in your backyard, that's where you're first telling stories in your head.
In TV, kid roles are like this: You're either in a couple minutes of an episode playing somebody's kid, or you get in these procedurals where you're crying or you're playing a witness or you're playing a crazy person. Every once in a while you get a big guest star role, but there's a formula to those TV shows.
I grew up a single kid and so my whole childhood was spent in my backyard dealing with imaginary circumstances and role playing and stuff.
Every evening, I would excuse myself from playing in the backyard and go inside to watch the evening news... I wanted to get out there and see the world, and as a kid, I knew that Peter Jennings had a thirst and hunger to travel the world, too.
I started out in a kid’s backyard playing touch football and I never abandoned the principle when I got to the pros: if they can’t touch you, they can’t tackle you.
I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.
Minnesota is a state of public-spirited and polite people, where you can get a good cappucino and eat Thai food and find any book you want and yet live on a quiet tree-lined street with a backyard and send your kids to public school. When a state this good hits the jackpot, it can only be an inspiration to everybody.
I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.
I don't think I'll be playing the Mirage or the Tropicana when I'm 40.
People create from different places. Some love to create from a tortured place, some from a joyful place. And when I feel like I'm a 5-year-old kid in my backyard playing pretend, that's when I'm happiest.
When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.
I'd be the only disabled kid in the neighborhood playing football, and we're playing full contact, and I'd always manage to get open.
I like Minnesota. I'd be very happy playing there.
It's incredibly important to my spirits and mental health that I come back to Minnesota and not be surrounded constantly with Hollywood life. Spending time in the backyard, helping out in the garden, going out to the lakes, reminds me of what's important and allows me to realign myself.