If you went to Harvard Medical School, chances are you'll be a doctor at some place. There's a career trajectory. Acting, there's nothing. It's constantly trying to procure jobs - it's very disconcerting.
I grew up in Queens and New Jersey. I started doing children's theater when I was seven to get out of school because I didn't fit in.
We signed with Roadrunner because, they almost signed us in '97 or something, and we've been wanting to work with Monty Connor, the guy who signed us, for a long time because he's been a huge fan of us since, I mean, in high school, when I was in high school and he was following our band.
I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
No one would have picked me out in high school and said, 'This guy is going to be in show business.' I don't have any of the talents you would normally associate with show business.
She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.
With any kind of physical test, I don't know what it is, I always seem to get competitive. Remember when you were in school and they'd do those hearing tests? And you'd really be listening hard, you know? I wanted to do unbelievable on the hearing test. I wanted them to come over to me after and go, 'We think you may have something close to super-hearing. What you heard was a cotton ball touching a piece of felt. We're sending the results to Washington, we'd like you to meet the President.'
My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small, predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.
As a means of subsidizing lawyers the present nuclear regulation system is well designed - but is there not perhaps a cheaper way of rewarding legal diligence? It would probably be cheaper to give each law school graduate a guaranteed salary of $50,000 a year on the condition that he (or she) not practice law.
I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art.
To play a lawyer and have one year of law school under your belt, you sort of know what you're talking about! I'm able to memorize the legal courtroom stuff a lot faster than I would have been able to otherwise.
Then to have your baby playing at the school you played at and having him play well is a special treat.
I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things, I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession, but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach, called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
When I was a school kid in Coventry, I used to put up anti-apartheid stickers.
I was a very young mod. The older mods at school used to like me because I brought in a copy of Mad magazine every week and let them read it. I think Mad magazine is the biggest influence in my life. At the age of ten, I decided I was going to have a band, one of the best in the country.
No one has found a gene for IQ. "Heritability" means that identicial twins are more similar than fraternal twins, right? Fraternal twins more similar than non-siblings. The heritability is 50 percent if your parents went to college. But if your parents never graduated high school the heritability is zero. Zero.
My first dunk ever was in middle school. We were playing, me and my church friends, and I dunked it, and I swear I could not sleep that night.
I think I got into acting because I kind of had not much else to do! I guess I was kind of looking for something challenging. I heard about the London Theater scene and it was very different from the upbringing that I had and it felt like a challenge. And the whole sort of London Theater schools, I was told that 6,000 apply and there are like 30 accepted to each one. I was like, "Yeah. Let's see if we can do that!"
I had a great drama teacher, and he sort of made out drama school as this incredibly difficult thing to get into: 6,000 people apply every year, and some of the schools only have 12 places. It's a phenomenally difficult thing to get into. And that excited me - I wanted that challenge.
I went to an all-boys school and hated feeling like one of the crowd.
It's not often that you get to read something that just feels very original for a star but also something that feels like it's more than just a movie or entertainment. Even though the riots were one of the most pivotal riots in civil rights history, especially for the LGBT community, I knew surprisingly very little about them. You don't learn about Stonewall in schools. It's a bit gross really! So it certainly felt like something that was quite important.
Most of all, I really wanted to become a filmmaker, and I've used every acting experience to just turn it into film school.
To my parents and all the people who reassured me that leaving high school and going into the draft was the right thing to do, I am forever thankful.
We do have to learn poetry at school. Poetry is interesting to me, particularly Chinese poetry. It's like an ancient form of song. There's five sentences, seven sentences - they're very different from English poetry. Chinese poetry is much more rigorous. You can only use this many words, and they will form some kind of rhythm so people can actually sing it. To me, poetry is quite abstract but also quite beautiful.
I've always been fortunate in that I'm quite good at what I do, but there have been many people who have made it to the high level and they weren't necessarily the fastest runner in their class at school. Concentrate on yourself. It's down to planning, preparation and being dedicated.
