You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and...
In 1878, after having finished my course of instruction at the School of Military Medicine of Val-de-Grace, I was sent to Algeria and put in charge of a department of the hospital at Bone. A large number of my patients had malarial fevers, and I was ...
I tried four times to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama before I got accepted. I started when I was 17, which was too young, in retrospect, and finally went when I was 21. I just kept plugging away. Determined? Yeah, I think I was.
If you want to believe that humans walked with dinosaurs and the planet is a few thousand years old, that is absolutely fine with me. If you want to teach this to your kids, I don't care. If states want to teach creationism in their schools, there is...
Birds do not attend flight schools; Rivers do not attend flowing colleges; Fishes do not attend swimming conferences; Trees do not attend fruit bearing seminars... There is something that you can do automatically that someone may not do... Find it an...
All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the 'bad guys' were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with 'Don't Lo...
My school reports always used to point out that my concentration levels were appalling. I never listened in class because I was always daydreaming about racing. I never thought for a moment about doing anything else. There was no guarantee that I'd m...
I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked ...
For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn't have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this z...
We're here so that Afghanistan does not once again become a sanctuary for transnational extremists the way it was when al-Qaeda planned the 9/11 attacks in the Kandahar area, conducted the initial training for the attackers in training camps in Afgha...
I went through a few phases of finding myself: I dabbled in musical theater, chess club, dance troupe, splatter-painting, school mascot (go Wildcats), babysitter, photojournalist, drill team girl, emo kid - and not one of them defined me, but every s...
I was first influenced by a friend in fifth grade when he brought a Walkman to school and was listening to 'Paradise City' by Guns 'N Roses, which he had concealed within his hoodie. He put the headphones over my ears and I was completely blown away ...
At 13, in my first year of Tonbridge, I went up for the part of Macbeth. I was up against the 17- and 18-year-olds, but for some reason I got the part. It made me incredibly unpopular with my peers, but it was the English and drama teachers who stepp...
People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person. Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anything I ...
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 a...
I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable ...
My wife - to-be and I went to see my father. Only he could answer the two questions before us: Shall we get married now? Shall I begin the practice of law, or continue being the successful wine salesman I had become, working my way through law school...
When you teach, you need to give the students incentives by grades or by other factors. I went to the Bible to find that topic in Scripture. I was shocked that after college and graduate school I had no idea that Jesus Christ had talked so much about...
I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I've probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour's drama workshop, I was tr...
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools an...
...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to...
