When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way.
In primary school when I was 6-7 years old, I always go to theater with my uncle, and I don't know why I like the atmosphere, dark only. The screen has some lighting, that kind of things, you can see the movie star and so that's why I like movies.
I'm from the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of screenwriting. I just like to preserve what works and ignore what doesn't work.
Ninety percent of the students take the 'preferred lender.' Why? Because that's the nature of the relationship. You trust the school. The school is in a position of authority.
Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.
The top priority is leaving no child behind. We want accountability in the system, and we want schools to recognize they have a responsibility to teach students.
Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and "I Have a Dream." And that's it!
I'm OK with guns in schools, if it's a security, trained security personnel. But every teacher having a gun, I don't know if I can jump up and down on that one and fully get behind it.
Our whole goal is really to create a culture of accountability. Because for a very long time, ending sexual assault has been on the backs of survivors. And it's really up to everyone to be part of the solution. It's really about not creating a culture of awareness. It's something I often tell parents of kids who are going off to college: It's about asking those hard questions when your kids are applying to school and encouraging them to ask about their rights, to ask about their resources.
I always knew I would sing. I just didn't know if I would be successful or not. But I sang at school, I sang at parties, I sang at church. Everyone always asked me to sing. I'd be playing football with my friends and my parents would ask me to sing for their guests. I was never very happy about that because I wanted to play football.
Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama... well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.
[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag."
Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.
We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy.
I think working on Shakespeare was a big part of my time at drama school. I'm so glad that I got to know Shakespeare and got a chance to play great parts in Shakespeare, because it really teaches you - or taught me, anyway - everything.
All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.
There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.
Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
When I was 23, basically I stopped modelling and started going to school, and was able to study with wonderful teachers.
I went to a high school reunion a couple years ago and realized that the kids who were the most unusual in high school are the ones who are the most interesting now and the ones who were popular are dull and boring.
If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country. I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.
My family couldn't be more supportive. They're worried and they're always in my business, and my mother does send me grad-school applications every now and again.
I had serious reservations about putting my son in the public schools in my area. I have a tremendous amount of fear for the future of my boy. He's nine-and- a-half and dark-skinned. By the time he's 12 or 13, who knows who he's going to be identifying with in these days when you get shot down for wearing expensive Nikes to school...I've heard that if a Latino makes it to 19 years of age, he has a good chance of surviving into adulthood. Up until then, you don't know.
I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.
I can't imagine going to an all-girls school. I went to a public school.