I struggled with depression when I was in high school, and I remember thinking that if I got a record deal and got a hit song, that it would solve all those problems for me.
When I was in high school I was a super serious athlete. I wasn't fun at all.
Most of my school friends and even a few of my teachers called me 'Duck.'
I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head.
When I got into high school, my favorite artist was definitely Janet Jackson.
My experience as a school nurse taught me that we need to make a concerted effort, all of us, to increase physical fitness activity among our children and to encourage all Americans to adopt a healthier diet that includes fruits and vegetables, but there is more.
Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.
High school for me was not all that fun. I think it's a lot more fun after when you realize that high school ends, and everything that's important at that time is sort of not important if people don't like your jeans or whatever. It doesn't matter.
Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.
So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.
I spent the majority of time at school trying to break the rules. I would climb to the top of buildings; I even burned a building down once - not intentionally, just because I was interested in fire. I remember going through the rule book, ticking off the ones I had broken and looking for the ones I hadn't.
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
I didn't study Greek mythology in school and I wish I had.
American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.
I went through a lot of battles in high school.
I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
Even if I had a tuxedo I wouldn't wear it to school.
When I was a kid in school, and you asked me what I was gonna be, I mean, even as a little first grader, I was gonna be a guitar picker on the 'Grand Ole Opry.' I just had it in my head that that's what I wanted to do, having no idea how it was done.
When I doing dinner theater in high school, I was talking to a woman who had been in the business for a while and I said I want to act, that's all I want to do with my life and she said if you're serious then you need to hone every discipline you can.
Right now I'm just thinking about school and trying to get those grades and keep them up! In case I become a Norma Desmond when I grow up, I can have something to fall back on!
I've always been really artistic. I went to an all-girls private Catholic school, and one of their biggest things was musical theater.
I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.
Music was always a huge part of me, but I always did it on the side. I didn't even take any music classes in high school... it was more of an extracurricular thing.
I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.
With my time in the limelight, I regret that I didn't use it more to push vegetarianism. I support vegetarian options in the school lunch program.
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
It never mattered to me that people in school didn't think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it - though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, 'I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.'
Some of the kids in school used to call my father a fake or a phony. That kind of thing brought on a few fights.
It's well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they're in middle school.
Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.
I went to the University of Vermont because I had a kind of unrequited love for this high school girlfriend. She wasn't even at the University but at another school nearby. But I thought if went to a school near her, just maybe... I was really remedial about girls in so many ways.
My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.
I think I knew I was funny in Elementary School. I think most funny people realize it when they're young. It tends to come out of stress or trauma - something that makes you want to be funny.
I learned to stand up for myself at school where I was never too popular.
I decided to become an actor because I was failing in school and I needed the credits.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
