Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.
Christmas Day itself hasn't always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that - I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.
Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.
Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
I have an addictive personality. Boarding school merely sent me more quickly on the downward spiral that dominated my childhood.
). Dozens of nations have agreed to join in monitoring and, if necessary, intercepting and boarding ships on the high seas in the event they are suspected of engaging in one or both of these threatening activities.
Homes make patriots. He who has sat by his own fireside with wife and children will defend it. Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket in defense of a boarding house. The prosperity and glory of our country depend upon the number of people who are the owners of homes.
When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.
At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes.
I love hiking, paddle boarding and listening to the Veronicas.
When I was 12, I went to boarding school, where I discovered the computer, which meant I no longer had to write something down and get someone to play it, I could just type it into the computer and hear it back.
I drifted into acting. My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage, and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. So it was natural for me to put on plays, too, when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama - I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory.
Being at boarding school in the pre-internet era, especially a boarding school tucked away in the Oxfordshire countryside, was like being in a cocoon. You had your own life; world events happened elsewhere.
I'm from the Detroit area, just north of Detroit. But then I went to boarding school in northern Michigan, so a little bit colder up there. But beautiful, very beautiful.
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
A system of bus rapid transit is not only dedicated lanes. You have to have really good boarding conditions - that means paying before entering the bus and boarding at the same level. And at the same time having a good schedule and frequency.
We lived in Germany; my father was in the Army, and they figured I would have more consistency at boarding school. That kind of gives you a thick skin.
I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy - a boarding school in Michigan - for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the 'Spring Awakening' tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool.
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel.
High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.
My family owned a furniture/appliance store near Kingston, Jamaica. I worked there all summer but lived in a very structured environment the rest of the year at an all-girl Catholic boarding school.
I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I'm not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh.
I know it sounds strange to say, but the very technologies that have made traveling easier for most people - GPS, automated ticket machines, online schedules and ticketing, boarding passes you can print out at home - have actually made things harder for me.
I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.
I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.
I think I've got better at expressing my emotions. But going through the education system I went through - I don't think you can go to boarding school and come out without feeling a little repressed - yes, it does leave its mark on you.
In my junior year of high school, I went to a boarding school for the arts: a school called the Governor's School for The Arts and Humanities. It was basically a mini-Juilliard - an intense training conservatory for the arts.
I probably deserve a bit of a kicking. And having been to boarding school, I've learnt to enjoy a good beating.
Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
For me, fighting is just so fun; I love it. It's just what I enjoy doing, and for me to go out there and go wake boarding and go rock climbing and then turn around and go fight, how awesome is that?
I think boarding school does give you an independence.
When I was a kid, in a very white boarding school in England in the '90s, I had this sort of middle part that kids had - that sort of long, floppy hair. So I was always desperate to have long, floppy hair, and I would try and brush it and spray it, and it would just look like a Brillo pad!
My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.
I went to boarding school in the country, so there's no real differentiation between family and friends. I went there from when I was 8 until I was 17 - it was insane. If you earn my friendship, you are my family, and I'll do anything for you.
