I liked science very much. A science teacher in high school inspired me, and because of him, I began studying science at the university. But when I got there... well, the subject still attracted me a lot ,but I had to do all these exams, and it was j...
I took a couple of classes in clowning, but that was more like Lucille Ball kind of slapstick, not Ringling Brothers. But we had to do things silently, and the teacher would do this running commentary. 'Does this make Clown sad? Oh, Clown doesn't lik...
The first acting thing I ever did was my senior year I decided not to play a sport in the Spring and, in that Spring B.J. Novak who went to school with me, asked if I'd be in this show that was a parody of all the teachers in the school, 'sure!' That...
I mean, Britain is a country of successful Muslim businesspeople, teachers and educators, journalists. So, we have to say very strongly that the two million plus Muslims in Britain, the vast bulk of them make a huge contribution to our society, and t...
You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of ou...
In high school, a teacher's friend in the police department asked me to go into a bar and flash a fake ID saying I was 21 even though I wasn't. They were assuming the bar wasn't carding people. Anyway, she forgot to ask for it back. I used it all fre...
Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
Prior to going to college, I had a pretty strong accent, and that was one of the things I had to work on a lot. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts; my speech teacher... that was one of the things we really had to work on over the years, and ...
I first started actually playing guitar when I was eleven years old. I had some neighborhood friends who told me they were starting a band and needed a guitarist. I told my folks, and by the next day I had a guitar lesson set up with a local teacher.
I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sunda...
I went to school at this log school house. A white woman was my teacher, I do not remember her name. My father had to pay her one dollar a month for me. Us kids that went to school did not have desks, we used slates and set on the hued down logs for ...
I thought, well of course, Kinsey absolutely adored teaching. He was a wonderful teacher. So these kids really inspired me. So that was a clue I hung onto. He loved young people, he absolutely loved them. And he loved teaching them and trying to help...
What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English te...
I'd always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, 'You know, you'll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,'...
My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother's necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother...
My high-school a cappella teacher would embarrass me in front of the choir. 'Mavis, you're in the basement. Mavis, you're singing with the boys.' I said, 'Mr. Finch, my voice isn't soprano. I can't sing up there with the girls.' So I just got out of ...
My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I'd rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney's barber shop.
I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself...
I've never considered being a cop. I could be a teacher, I could be a minister, a social worker or a professor. As long I don't have to see blood and see people die every day, if I could inspire or help in their lives, that's something I'd want to do...
During my own gap year, I learned an invaluable lesson - that I was a lousy teacher. Even though the children I 'taught,' in upcountry Uganda, were desperate for qualifications, they largely ignored me. Until, that is, I realised that they wanted to ...
I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give b...
