As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.
Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.
My dad is a good role model for me, and then I had a high school coach that really helped me out when I was struggling and made a big difference in my life.
I went to drama school in Paris and started doing theatre with a friend. Then I moved into movies and slowly but surely I got roles.
Drama school is fundamentally practical. I didn't write any essays, so I came out with a BA honors degree in acting.
I think every school in the world should have a sports program.
I'd love to open a tennis school for children in my hometown of Sochi.
My school friends thought I was outgoing and bubbly, but that masked a lot of insecurities, and maybe that's the reason I chose drama - to build a bit of self-confidence. I had a great teacher, and I won a few speech and drama competitions and just fell in love with it.
I will always consider myself a punk because of those experiences in high school. It will always be a part of me.
Although I could read before I went to school, and I won the school reading prize at five years old, my early children's stories came from the radio and watching films at a cinema on Saturday mornings in Australia. It wasn't until I was nine years old on a ship returning from Australia that I was introduced to children's books.
I'm a late bloomer. Even in high school, everyone else was charging ahead, and I didn't come into my own until very late. I feel that's true in cinema, too. I didn't even start 'Metropolitan' until I was 37.
I always wanted to be a filmmaker, but I started acting when I was 9 years old. I looked a certain part that I wasn't, really. I played, you know, a high school jock with a lot of attitude or a spoiled rich kid, and I was neither of those things. I was from a very working-class family in Van Nuys.
I was a mad, impressionable kid, and every skit from 'The College Dropout' was telling me how I didn't need school.
I would leave school every day and walk to my grandparents' house under the El because everyone worked. I was 6 and walking home alone from school. It was a different city and a different time.
I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.
I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.
I'm very much half-American - my mom is American. I grew up in Australia until I was 16, then I finished high school over here because I got into this performing arts high school.
It would be great to go to school all year and do movies during the summer, but it doesn't work that way. I'm not Julia Roberts, so I have to be flexible.
We knew sports was important to us and our family, but there are priorities in life.Obviously, faith is foremost; how we did in school is important. If we didn't handle that business then there were no privileges.
I wanted to represent minorities in the respect of people who had been bullied in school or people who were gay or lesbian or trans or people who aren't blonde haired and blue-eyed. I have short hair, and I am covered in tattoos. I like showing people that it's within their rights to be different.
I took the obligatory economics classes in school, but I've long been a fan of the Milton Friedman philosophy and its libertarian bent: One must be free to do what one wants to do, as long as you don't harm another. This is the seminal treatise on free-market economics.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I was straight out of grad school, and I didn't have a single credit to my name. I knew one person in town - another actor whose name is John Billingsley. I just had to audition and audition and audition. I was plugging away for 15 years. So I earned my stripes!
Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.
Everywhere you look, there is a charity or a project in school to get involved in. In eighth grade, there was this program called CJSF, California Junior Scholarship Foundation. We were involved in soup kitchens and toy drives, and your school can set up something like that. If your school doesn't have a program like that, set one up.
I was very much a tough New York street kid. I went to a school where you had to learn how to get along with everybody or fight with everybody, and I did my fair share of both.
I think I have always been a hard worker in school and in sports and everything. Growing up, my parents encouraged me to do that from day one.
Junior high is so much worse than high school because at least in high school different is more accepted, celebrated actually: all the girls with blue hair and gothic Hello Kitty backpacks.
My intent was to go to law school... And then what I realised quickly is what I wanted was to be on L.A. Law.
I was not popular. I was the kid in school that was bullied.
I've always been in rock bands. I was in a rock band with my brother in high school. Then I was playing classical guitar recitals, and people said, 'You know, you can't really do both things.' My intuition told me they were wrong. Somehow, what was interesting about me was that I had those two things in my life.
I never went to my high school dance, and didn't date much.
Once the kids are in school, it's amazing what you can do.
Growing up in college, in high school, I was the focal point.
I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.
I was never the cool kid in school, and loads of people told me that I was weird, that I dressed uncool and did uncool things, that I was too nice, too happy.
I went to eight different schools my first nine years of school.
