All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.
So I just came out here to Los Angeles with a bunch of buddies I had gone to film school with. You know, for better or worse, we just tried to slug it out here.
I have this recurring nightmare where I'm giving a speech in front of my old high school classmates, and they start laughing at me, and I look down and realize I'm naked. And a shark.
Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.
Bullying wasn't okay in elementary school and it isn't okay now, especially when it comes in the form of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
I'm a big rock star, I got a beautiful girl, and they still call me a fag. Its' like high school never ends - the jocks are always on top.
I think my formative experiences were really in junior high, where at a typical public school we were doing little genetic experiments, very classic experiments.
I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
People have disliked me. You know, in high school, I wasn't the most popular kid. I wasn't the nerdiest kid. I was kind of in the middle.
I was voted best-looking kid in high school but, as you can see, things changed. I used to say I was a 260 pound Woody Allen. You can make that 295 pound now.
When I was fresh out of law school, I had a burning desire to do something important, to have an impact in some way, but I didn't know what it was.
I was 17, and all I wanted to do was to get away from England and the awful, boring boarding schools I'd been going to there. The last one was taught by monks, and I couldn't wait to get out.
Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.
Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself. Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.
As somebody who visits countless schools, I see firsthand the dire situation our educational system faces.
Secondary school parents tell me that they are frustrated, that their teachers ignore them, their children don't give them much feedback because they are adolescents, they feel kind of out of the loop.
I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
My first dunk ever was in middle school. We were playing, me and my church friends, and I dunked it, and I swear I could not sleep that night.
I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing.
