I knew I wasn't going to write a record as soon as I got signed, because I hadn't had any life experiences. I was still at school, and I wasn't going to write about that.
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 hated school so bad. I only liked art class during high school. I was always smart.
I fell in love with this idea of an old school game character, like Donkey Kong, who looks like a very simple guy but is really wrestling with this very profound struggle: 'What's the meaning of life? What if I don't like this job I've been programmed to do?'
I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.
I left 'Saturday Night Live' without a film to go to, and I'd filmed 'Old School' while I was in my last season of the show, and that hadn't come out yet. I was a free agent, in a way, but I knew it was time to leave the show and test the water.
I was actually deputy headboy at my school. And everyone around me was very supportive of what I wanted to do. There's no romantic story about how me and my brother got to where we are.
My favorite thing before going to school was watching 'Full House,' 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch,' and 'Boy Meets World.'
There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.
I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand.
I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.
Our promise to our children should be this: if you do well in school, we will pay for you to obtain a college degree.
I was a completely below-average high school student. I never went to college.
When Kate was born, she was born into a world of joy and happiness and confidence. The difference between the children is night and day. She's happy, she's thriving, she's full of self-confidence. I tell her she's beautiful every day before I send her off to school.
My father made me who I am. He gave me a basketball and told me to play with the ball, sleep with the ball, dream with the ball. Just don't take it to school. I used it as a pillow, and it never gave me a stiff neck.
You can always keep learning with acting, because the school is life and yourself and your friends and your relationships. I'm fascinated by it! It's infinito!
The first sign of real obsession with music was with an old wind-up gramophone that mum had thrown out into the garage. My parents gave me three old 45s - two Supremes records and one Tom Jones record - and I used to come home from school literally every day, go out to the garage, wind this thing up, and play them.
I am a very reserved person and have very few friends in the industry, while most of my close ones are from school and college.
The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.
I think, from every actor I've ever spoken to, they say the biggest thing they regret from life is not finishing school.
There's a lot of middle school behavior in Washington, D.C. I look at that and I say, 'I've seen that before,' it was just with a 14-year-old.
My parents raised me with a never-give-up attitude, telling me I could be anything I wanted to be. I was a serious violinist and a valedictorian of my high school class. I knew all about hard work.
When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day.
I graduated from public high school. I went to the prom. I did it all. But I also worked on 30-million dollar movies with roller coasters and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's been a very interesting and blessed life for sure.
In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.
By high school, I was already tall - 5-foot-8 - and one day I made the mistake of wearing green tights. The football players all started calling me the Jolly Green Giant.
I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.
I believe that over 90 percent of LU students try hard to comply with the behavioral code and are supportive of the school's mission.
At school, I'd refuse to take part in biology lessons when animals were being dissected. One time, the teacher announced that we would be gassing worms. So I ran around the room, gathered up all the worms and set them free in the fields. I just loved animals and couldn't bear the thought of them suffering.
At a certain point, the graduate school thing didn't work out, and that meant I was liberated.
I was about 14 when I started with a theater group; it was like a stage group on the weekends alongside school. And it was run by a group of guys who'd been to drama school themselves in London. So they introduced us to techniques that they'd learn about, and they kind of informed us about improvisation and screenwriting and all of that stuff.
Young Hollywood can absolutely feel like high school sometimes, which is hard, but it's part of life. If you get enough humans involved, there is bound to be a little drama.
Figure skating has been a great influence for me. I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror.
My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.
I had never dreamed about the NBA like some guys did. I was a non-scholarship player at an NAIA college. I played on the Boys and Girls Club team in my freshman and sophomore years of high school before I made the high school team. I was our backup center in college.
When I was a young boy, I preferred cats to dogs. From the age of seven or eight onwards I just felt more comfortable with cats. And I felt more comfortable with girls, I didn't really like hanging out with guys. When I was about ten or eleven, I was friendlier with the girls in my school than with the guys.
