I think everyone feels lost at times during their high school years.
I had a lot of racism growing up where I grew up. Bullied at school. It definitely encouraged me. It's like battle wounds - you come out the other side, and it just makes you tougher.
If did go back to school, I would want to learn another aspect of the entertainment industry like to become a producer or an agent, you need a law degree.
I kind of just lucked into and fell into the other profession. It was really just an outgrowth of the fact that when I was in art school, I had no money whatsoever.
But I got drafted out of high school, and my mother wasn't having it. She was like, you're not about to think that you can just play ball, because if you get hurt, you're going to be out of luck.
I love the way this sport has evolved and impacted every segment of society. Now you have cross training and weight training in every sport and from middle school kids to senior citizens.
Pizza certainly has its place in school meals, but equating it with broccoli, carrots and celery seriously undermines this nation's efforts to support children's health and their ability to learn because of better school nutrition.
School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect and nobody's perfect so why bother.
You're working with adults and you're being paid to do a job. And you're a kid. Then you go back to high school, and everybody's partying, and they're doing math. I always felt a little bit outside of it. Outside of both experiences, really.
Whenever we had career day at elementary school, and we could dress up like what you wanted to be, when I got on stage, mine was playing major league baseball.
I went to UCF in Florida in Orlando. I went for advertising and public relations. I moved out to California my senior year because I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I also wanted to finish school and get my degree. I took mainly a bunch of criminal justice courses online for the last year because that's all that they offered.
I dropped out of law school when I got my record deal.
I was the fastest typist in my school, and I had an obsession with spelling and memorizing.
Kids are appendages on so many family sitcoms. They'll come in, they'll make half a joke, and then they're like, 'OK, gotta go to school,' or 'I'm going to my room.' And then you never see them again.
My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.
I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.
We'd play at the Ambassador's house for an invited group of dignitaries from the government that might have gone to school in America; to the U.S. Consulate that invites certain people that they're trying to target.
No matter what kind of day I've had at school, I always look forward to golf.
I started playing piano age six. I was also singing in the choir, so my mum put me into music school. I went to study there for seven years, but it was not my passion. I quit because I wanted to study marketing. But I can still play piano.
I've been playing music all my life, from being a choir soloist at Symphony Hall as a youngster to playing in bands through high school and college at Kent State. Went in the service at 17, out before I was 21.
A good day to me is writing from 6 A.M. 'til noon with a break to take my daughter to school. After lunch, if I still feel the momentum, I'll hit it again.
Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising.
My mother's studies stopped with the third year of primary school, my father with the first. They taught me a deep sense of duty. But nobody was involved in politics in my family.
I was a D student in high school and on the dean's list in college.
When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.
I'm married, I have a couple kids, I've traveled a lot, I've done book tours a lot, I'm happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.
I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't excited by the teaching of the school. If they'd been intent on really teaching you things, I would have been a little more attentive.
I did dancing and singing when I was little, and then when I was 12 years old my friends were taking speech and drama at school. They were private lessons, and I started doing that. Over the years everyone else dropped out and I just kept going. I loved it.
I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'
I knew what type of player I was: a free agent, a small kid who came from a small school.
In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.
My father was a World War II Marine who became a high school principal. He always had a heart for students who maybe were underprivileged or had difficulty of some sort.
The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there.
When I was growing up in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, I sold doughnuts, popcorn and Kool Aid every day after school so that my family had some money and I could pay my school fees. It was a tough life.
My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.
