Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that's Hollywood.
I don't feel I was ever a 'famous' child actor. I was just a working actor who happened to be a kid. I was never really in a hit show until I was a teenager with West Wing playing First Daughter Zoey Bartlet. In a way that was my saving grace - not being a star on a hit show. It kept me working and kept me grounded.
I became very famous as a teenager and my name and photo were splashed in all the media. They made me larger than life so I wanted to live larger than life and the only way to do that was to be intoxicated.
An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.
If I could sell 500 million records every time it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager in a very kind of model version of it.
I'm very jealous of my daughter's education. She's been inspired by her teachers and nobody inspired me as a teenager.
I came at age in the '60s and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
I feel like I am a real artist and I want to be able to feel what I am singing about. So when I sing 'Leave (Get Out) ' I have been through that. I think it is just a new generation whether people are ready for it or not. Teenagers are dating.
When I was a teenager my dad used to call me 'Hollywood' because I wore sunglasses all the time even at night. Cue song.
My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.
My dad? He died when I was 19 which is a bad time for your dad to die because there's an awful lot of things you have to resolve with your parents past your teens if you've been a difficult teenager.
Once I had all the facts in I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager I didn't have any skills for writing as such so it came out in 1500 words.
For 'The Haunting Hour ' I thought it would be a lot of fun. It was great to play this cool kid role. My episode is called 'The Intruders' and my character is this mean angry teenager because her younger brother was just born and he gets all of the attention. She's always playing tricks on her family and there are some cool twists.
I think you go through a period as a teenager of being quite cool and unaffected by things.
I get letters from kids teenagers and young girls who just want to be Mac. I've had quite a few people actually say that they're going to become a Marine or a JAG lawyer because of me... the character. I think that's pretty cool!
Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes say Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like 'I like that guy he's cool. How is he less than me?
I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.
It was all that stuff about taking your parents' car when you're 13 sneaking booze into rock shows and ditching school with your friends. I could relate to that as a former teenager rather than as a present parent.
Well it is so difficult right now when you look out on the road and how fast people go and the more and more cars you see out there for teenagers you'd think a kid that literally a few years before was sitting back in a car seat in the back seat is now behind the wheel.
I drank a lot when I was a teenager and I don't drink any more because that's when I thought you know I'm gonna end up a car wreck.
Johnny Guitar... just one of my favorite singers of all time. I met him when we were both on the road with Johnny Otis in the '50s when I was a teenager. We traveled the country in a car together.I would hear him sing every night.
If you say 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it ' well then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record I'm just going to cut the things that I like and whoever likes it likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.
If you have a line of business - I know this as a CEO - or if you have a teenager - I know this as a parent - who have a spending problem what do you do? You quit giving them money.
I'm no actor. And I wasn't like George Lucas or Spielberg making home movies as a teenager either. But I would go back and watch certain movies again and again. By the time I saw 'The Graduate' I was aware of how these amazing stories could be told.