I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.

The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

Most Americans don't care about gay marriage.

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

The two most joyous times of the year are Christmas morning and the end of school.

I have never made fun of religion. Religion is something I don't even want to mess with, because I am really afraid of the clouds opening up and my being struck by lightning.

I'm very romantic, I'm extremely romantic. I date my wife.

They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.

The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.

I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go.

It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it.

'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.

Halloween starts earlier and earlier, just like Christmas.

I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years.

Horror movies travel pretty well anyway. They're like action movies: People overseas can watch them and enjoy them, and they're not so culturally specific in terms of their references, and they can follow a good scary story.

Death by plane crash scares me. I travel a lot, and when you hit turbulence, and post 9/11, that's in the back of my mind a bit.

There'll always be movies that are meant for the big screen, and they should be seen that way.

As a result of playing Freddy Krueger, I can remember having to look at some medical books, and at some of the disfigurement that fire can cause on people, because they were the source material for some of the prosthetic makeup that I wore. That aided and abetted this fear of death by fire. Which is sort of what happened to Fred Krueger.

What I'm not saying is that all government spending is bad. It's not - far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.

Because tax cuts create an incentive to increase output, employment, and production, they also help balance the budget by reducing means-tested government expenditures. A faster-growing economy means lower unemployment and higher incomes, resulting in reduced unemployment benefits and other social welfare programs.

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

When I was a kid, we would get McDonalds on Christmas Eve, and that was a big deal because the closest one to the south side of Chicago was a 35 minute drive away. I remember opening the bag and smelling those fries, and even now when I smell them, it reminds me of Christmas Eve.

I've been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.

The world, universe, God, whatever you call it, has so much more in store if you just sit back and relax and do what's right in front of you.

I wanted to - any chance I had to dress up as a boy, like Halloween, I would be a pirate or a ghost that wore a tie. A hobo.

I think humor is such a personal thing, and you put a microphone in somebody's face, they're going to say something that offends somebody.

I was born with an extremely negative attitude. I was the kid who wouldn't smile in Christmas photos, was a poor sport, and hated a lot of things. I eventually grew out of my negativity when I matured.

I grew up in a small town in Kansas, so I love meeting the fans. Those are the people who spend time out of their day to watch the things that I've done, and I've gotten to do some great supernatural stuff - 'Teen Wolf' and 'The Gates' before that - so it's nice when I get to go to Comic-Con every year.

I think doing 'Teen Wolf' is just giving me a really great opportunity to possibly get other jobs and show what I can do.

I think the fans from the original 'Teen Wolf' tuned in expecting us to ruin the franchise, and I think that we've only heightened it. So we've brought 'Teen Wolf' back.

My family background is Mexican, and I was born in Chicago. It's pretty much family tradition every time we get together for Christmas and major holidays to sing. Our family time is centered around the food and a little bit of performing for one another.

That's the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.

You know you're getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It's like, 'See if you can blow this out.'

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.

Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.