I spent my last year of high school in Latin America, and there's a edge of salsa under all of my rhythms.
I didn't know anything about acting, I didn't know anything about theater, but I was just an exceptional student at high school. I wanted to play ball; I'm going after a basketball scholarship and be a doctor. I got injured and my marks began to drop.
Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Save the Children is an awesome charity that has helped more than 125 million children around the world, providing everything from school books to food to blankets and shelter.
I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?'
I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.
I didn't know I was poor, growing up, because everyone was in the same boat. I couldn't have bikes. It never really bothered me, but I could have any book. I loved school; I loved learning. Yeah, I never cared for possessions. I still don't, really.
I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.
I left Scotland when I was 16 because I had no qualifications for anything but the Navy, having left school at 13.
I like to say I was a creature in high school. A weird creature who had my hands in a lot of different things.
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.
I am pretty geeky, yes. I like odd sub-culture activities, I am often socially inept, I wore glasses in high school. But I am a modern geek.
I was home-schooled. My mom wasn't a fan of public school systems.
My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
I was not the popular kid in school.
It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana.
I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn't have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters 'of The Borrower.'
I know I'm not known as method. By nature I'm not a brooder. What I continue to use is a mixture of the English school, which is traditionally outside-in, and the more American way of working from the inside out.
According to a study by Achieve Incorporated, Texas is the first state to make a college-prep curriculum the standard coursework in high school, starting with this year's ninth grade class.
I took high school very casually. There was Teen Town, chess, tennis, boxing, running. Lots of things going on.
Sloppy casual has always been my default look. My preppier classmates in high school would sometimes sport two, three, even four shirts at a time - Lauren, Izod, Brooks Brothers, all collars-up - while I wore secondhand faded olive German-army fatigues and this cool T-shirt with a troll on it.
I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends.
A career in film didn't seem like something I could attain. Whereas I grew up next to New York City, and I spent my life going into New York City seeing plays, and I was a theater actor in school. Acting on the stage felt really natural to me, and I liked it, and I wasn't terrible at it.
We spend so much time together, because that's how we like it. I never used to go on girl's nights out, even at school. And Paul has never liked going out for a night with the boys, either.
If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.
My mom used to model when she was younger, before she went to law school, and I think she thought it was pretty cool. I think my parents saw that acting ultimately made me happy, even though it was a rough ride for a little bit.
I was quite cocky, but having been hailed as this great young golfer, I couldn't even make the high school golf team once I got there. I had a big dose of humble pie then, and ever since, I've always known that there is always someone out there better than you, more talented. Always.
Half the states have stopped making civics and government a requirement for high school. Half.
I've always loved horses. I had one horse when I was in high school, but I had to sell him because we moved to Germany, and it ripped my heart out, so I never wanted to go through that pain again. When we moved to Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky, I was able to ride then.
Drama school, you know, I own an acting school, Actor Prepares.
Everything in high school seems like the most important thing that's ever happened in your life. It's not. You'll get out of high school and you never see those people again. All the people who torment and press you won't make a difference in your life in the long haul.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
It's very difficult in our society. You cannot impose certain behavioral changes. Education can do it at the right time, probably by high school. After that it is too late.
I really feel like the first day I went to drama school and I went up on stage, that I found my vocation. It's kind of a cliched thing to say but I really feel like it was what I was meant to do.
