Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.
One of my earliest ventures was when I was nine years old. I realized there was a shortage of pencils at school, so I started Rent-a-Pencil. But I made a fundamental mistake. Everybody stole my pencils.
Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, y...
When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.
If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sport...
Growing up it was the exception because I was maybe the only one in my school or my circle of friends that had that experience. But now that I know more people in the industry, I am realizing this happens to almost everybody.
An unforgettable experience happened on December 15, 1996 when I won the Supermodel contest while still in school. I was just seventeen years old then. Winning that competition was the turning point of my life. That's how I got into modeling and late...
My first big one-person show was basically a combination of my family, me during puberty, embarrassing newspaper articles that were written about me in high school, my first modeling photos, and terrible things that people said about me on the Intern...
I never had a problem with social situations. A lot of times, when people are in school, they can have a little hesitancy because people are mean sometimes. I never had that problem because I never had that experience. So, I had a pretty easy transit...
I've had an experience through music that has touched almost every part of me. It educated me in ways that I didn't get educated in school. So we try to lay on a bit of that, through being funny, being serious, playing hard.
I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 1...
That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve.
Schools and parents can team up to find books that kids will really get excited about - that will make them say, 'That was a great experience. Now I know why people get excited about reading.'
In my own experience, I plotted and planned my life when I was getting out of law school to know by what year I'd make it to the Supreme Court. That didn't work out the way I planned.
It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and ano...
I graduated in '91, so the '90s for me were very much the first years out of school, so I can't really look at that decade as independent of my own experience of my 20s, really.
In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.
Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.
It's been crazy. My life has totally changed. One week I was in school, hanging out with my friends and the next, I'm going to the L.A. premiere of one of the year's biggest movies. It's been a crazy experience.
When I was at primary school, we had this theory that if you ate an egg, it meant you'd get pregnant and give birth to a chicken or another egg. It was something we dared together. I avoided eggs for years, but now they're my favourite food.
Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state, everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized; school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and for...
