Pastoral Resources

My dad took me to all the best rock and punk shows when I was growing up and music has always been a part of my life. So I'm very interested in the music scene and I suppose that's why I've ended up going out with musicians. Dave Pirner is still one of my best friends.

I have this sense that I didn't really start growing up until my twenties.

I'm very comfortable as a singer. In fact, I think it's more - I identified my self-esteem, my self more in those ways when I was growing up. I really - it was kind of my calling card as a kid.

Growing up, my dolls were doctors and on secret missions. I had Barbie Goes Rambo.

I don't know who I touch and who I don't. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don't have any secrets. I don't know the reasons I've been so well received.

I don't think about that. I wasn't a kid growing up saying one day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn't on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

It is a different world than when I was growing up, and you started to just kind of maintain at thirty-five and just hope you can hope it together. People are a lot more vital than I am and doing all kinds of things and leading really important movements.

I guess I'm growing up in the film world.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

When I was growing up, my mother would take me to plays and museums, and we'd talk about life. Those times helped shape who I became.

When I was growing up, so many of the important changes for African-Americans were being made in the United States Supreme Court and were being made by lawyers. I followed the court very intensely and wanted to do that for my life.

David and Dad didn't get along too well growing up. I mean we all got along, but it was harder on David, because David wasn't going to be the son that Dad wanted. But now they're like best friends.

Intimacy is a wonderful thing. It's frustrating that growing up I thought it was wrong. It isn't. Exploring your sexuality is important when you're growing up.

We have to mainstream everybody. No matter what their circumstances when they were growing up. Part of that is knowing that after they're finished with school, everybody in this country gets up and goes to work.

When I was growing up, it was 'Communists'. Now it's 'Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.

Growing up I felt like my nose was big. I was always like, 'I'm going to get a nose job one day'. I'm glad I didn't.

When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.

So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.

When I was growing up, we used to play basketball in a park that was never shoveled when it snowed. The basketball rims were never fixed. And we understood then that there was a relationship between public policy and our quality of life.