A Quote by Kwame Alexander

If your father, who is known for carrying around a belt, told you to read a book, you went and did it. I've never spanked my kid - I think because in my household you were afraid. If you did something wrong and got caught, you were getting spanked.
By the time kids are 15, they're drunks and they're drug addicts and they're getting chicks pregnant. The parents wonder, "What did I do wrong?" What you did wrong was, you were never there. You had the kid as a status symbol, that's what went wrong. And you're paying the price for it.
My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read.
I never did pageants as a kid, but when I got into high school, I did a couple that were tied to a sort of all-around academic student achievement program, something akin to Junior Miss, but not Junior Miss.
When I was a kid, I read many of my mom's books. Sometimes, there were mysteries, but there were no delineations, and my mother never talked about book genres. Nor did we differentiate genres in school.
I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.
As a child, I used to laugh when my mother spanked me. No matter what she did, she could never get me to cry.
I think people are wrong to do it, to compare him to your way of wanting to do it. If you're passionate about it, do it and do it your way. It's not always going to be in front of the cameras after a football game - that was the way I did it. Somebody else has a different way, and that's [James] LeBron, and I know who he is. And I can't get into specifics, but it did upset me that people were calling him out for that because they were just wrong.
I think back to my childhood, and I remember running around as a kid. We were all running around then. It wasn't about getting into shape. It's just what we did.
Nothing we did in those days has caused a change." "Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse," I told him.
Not to get too deep, but I was brought up by these women who if you wanted to label them, maybe they were feminists, but you know what? They never asked for that or wanted it and they never got up on a soapbox and spoke about it, they just did it. They did their work, they did their jobs, they were who they were.
Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri. Kids did not read comic books back then.
I was bad, but I was one of the kids that never got caught. If anyone ever knew I did something, it was because I told them. 'Cause I'm a really good liar, so I end up snitching on myself.
I was pretty subdued [as a kid ] because I didn't want to get spanked, and I didn't want to go to Hell.
I did Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. It was a sequence where the president got captured and they made a doppelgänger of the president who was kind of goofy. They were Second City people who were the producers and writers, and they told my agent, "Well, we know Fred can do the kind of goofy, but we're not sure he can do be the straight president, kind of the Clinton-esque." So I really got my back up and I called my agent and I said, "Goddammit, I insist that I go in and read." And I did a great job and I got the part.
My mom always told me: Never make fun of anybody, because you never know what that person is going through. Ever since I was a kid, I never did. I never did.
While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.
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