I remember kickboxing and traveling the world when I was young. I would go to Japan or Africa, and I would go for the experience. As soon as I got off the plane, we'd go have a good time, party. Fighting was just the outlet of what I was doing there.
A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age.
I was a little nerdy, but I got along with everybody. I had fun at school - skateboarding, surfing, getting kicked out of class for making too much noise.
I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
I grew up in the late '70s. We played outside all day. I think that's where I got the whole notion of being an actor, you know, stunt fighting with my friends.
When you are 16 you are supposed to be doing cool things, like sneaking alcohol, not living in Disney World and doing skits about mice.
The first time I did everything was in Paisley - the first time I went to the pictures or the bowling or the ice rink or the swimming baths.
CHILDHOOD: The rapidly shrinking interval between infancy and first arrest on a drug or weapons charge.
I went through puberty in a theme park. I'm grateful. That place was a landscape to me. I had adventures every day.
I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.
I was the most reckless little kid. I only had guy friends. I had a Nintendo, and when I went to normal school, I used to tape it under my desk and then pull it out and play on it.
I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.
Travel is never a matter of money but of courage. I spent a large part of my youth traveling the world as a hippie. And what money did I have then? None. I barely had enough to pay for my fare. But I still consider those to have been the best years of my youth. The great lessons I learned has been precisely those that my journeys had taught me.
I wasn't a club kid. I wasn't an artist. I was just a foreigner, trying to soak it all up. I had quite a lot of fun.
My friend Jonathan had a great tree house. It was awesome. It was like a big fort up in this tall magnolia tree... That's where we would conduct our very important business, I'm sure, with all our bikes leaning up against a tree and no girls allowed, handling all sorts of important things you handle when you're seven or eight.
When I was 16, I played Tallulah in 'Bugsy Malone' at the Queen's Theatre. Me and five others shared a flat together in Blackheath. It was brilliant being 16 and living in London with my mates.
I mean there's a college kid left in everyone. I bet you, too, if you could go back you would for a night or two, so why not? My brother's still in college, my little brother, so it's always good to go back and get a little glimpse of it and to hang out with him for a weekend or two.
When I was 3, my parents strapped on a pair of Playskool plastic roller skates to my feet, and that's where the story begins.
If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.
I remember standing outside of the dorm by the little terrace. I was going to do this job that I wasn't 100 percent certain of, which ended up being much more fun than I expected [in So Notorious].
I have a lot of stories about being a kid because it was the last time I was interesting.
My mother and I lived in an apartment complex in a neighborhood. So there was a gaggle of kids. Every day after school, we'd just meet up in a field, and some game would be chosen, Wiffle ball or tag, and you'd play that until the streetlights came on.
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.
