School

I was never really good in school.

My children went to Bethesda Elementary School. I wouldn't do anything to endanger the safety of Bethesda.

I was in high school when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled India's flag in New Delhi.

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.

Towards the end of the military service, I had to make what I assume has been the most important decision in my career: to start a residency in clinical medicine, in surgery, which was my favorite choice, or to enroll into graduate school and start a career in scientific research. It was clear to me that I was heading for graduate school.

I remember in high school thinking that I wanted to be a lawyer, and now I realize I saw that movie 'And Justice for All' when I was a kid and thought, 'That's what lawyers do, and I want to get up and yell and scream in the middle of a courtroom.'

I was always told at school that you had to have a back-up plan, but all I ever wanted to do was act. There was no plan B for me.

Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students, but exempt them from studying religion. Obama's school documents, though, wrongly list him as being Indonesian.

Was Sen. Barack Obama a Muslim? Did he ever practice Islam? The presidential candidate officially rejects the claims, but the issue of Obama's personal faith has re-emerged amid conflicting accounts of his enrollment as a Muslim during elementary school in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Widely distributed reports have noted in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro.

The philosophy of the school was quite simple - the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like.

I'm typically a 'just drink water' kind of guy. I was a bodybuilder in high school, so I used to - food to me was, 'there are this many grams of carbohydrates and proteins, and I need these micronutrients in order to grow and be fit,' and I ate in order to live and not live in order to eat, and I think most people are the opposite.

I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.

I was very driven in high school. I worked a bunch of odd jobs. I never partied. I never drank. I was just a theater geek who was obsessed with movies.

Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.

Through the Internet, I've developed a strong social network - something I could never do if I had to keep my choice of peers within school grounds.

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school.

The process of my transformation came to a head with my discovery of St. Francis of Assisi during a pilgrimage I went on with a scout troop from my school.

Football games on Friday nights followed by field parties every weekend was how I spent my high school years.

I started getting really interested in comedy when I was in middle school.

When I lived in Baltimore, I would come down fairly often to go to the Hirshhorn, and one of my good friends from high school went to Georgetown. I actually ended up going to Annapolis a lot. I had a car, and it was such a serene place to drive.

When I was in high school, my mom worked at Bed, Bath and Beyond, so I was always there.

If I can help a kid feel more comfortable in their skin because they're struggling with maybe the things I struggled with in high school, that's great.

So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education.

Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.

You know what they call the fellow who finishes last in his medical school graduating class? They call him 'Doctor.'

I sang in a reggae band. And then there was a soul band where I sang back-up vocals and some lead. And I was also in a women's a capella group. And I was in the gospel choir at school. Actually, I've always been in choirs. Or some kind of group. Just because I love singing so much. But I truthfully never thought of it as a career.

I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well.

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

I'm a championship handball player. I'm a championship softball and baseball player. I used to be an extremely talented center in high school in football. I also dabbled in lacrosse and soccer. I'm really good at billiards, darts, shuffleboard.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

My kindergarten teacher encouraged me to learn, as did my school headmaster, who gave me a grant to study.

I was in high school. A couple of my friends and I decided we had to be in a class together where we could fool around, and drama was it because we'd do improvs, beating each other up. They left a year later, and I stayed in and got a knack for it, and enjoyed the whole process.

I was actually pretty shy in school. My defense mechanism was to be the class clown. I remember getting into a lot of trouble for being disruptive, and I was brought in front of the headteacher, who said: 'What's going to happen to you, what are you going to do when you grow up?' and I said: 'Well, I'm obviously going to be a comedian.'

When I was in high school, there's no doubt I was trying to swing like Tiger Woods when he first came on tour.

I think making friends is not being afraid to look stupid, because everyone wants a friend who is willing to be stupid and fun. If you try and be too cool, it only works in high school. After that, being uncool is a very cool thing to do. So just have fun, and don't worry what other people think of you and people will want to be your friends.

I tried out for my basketball team every year and I never made it. You had to buy the shoes before you knew if you were on the team because it took a few weeks for them to ship. I bought the shoes every year, never once made the team, had a ton of high school basketball shoes.

My senior year of high school, I got into UCLA, but my family couldn't afford it.

I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it. You don't have a lot of options in Indiana anyway, though, so I didn't want to stay there. I graduated early and worked a bunch of really odd jobs, and then I joined the Marines.

I mean, I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it.

Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.

When I happened to get into school, I felt like I could approach it as aggressively as things in the military.

I'm convinced many of America's heroes are public school teachers and administrators. Many of these people do what they do because of their faith.

I didn't feel attractive in high school.

I never wore full-on eyeliner in high school, but I wanted to.

I was a huge fan of comedy in high school.

McCain is the kid who was really cool in middle school but never got high school game and people are sick of him acting like he's still popular.

Obama is the new kid with the weird name who people just sense is a little classier than his surroundings. He moved from a private school where he was class president and is now at the giant public high school with the metal detectors and the smoking lounge.

I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.

People, when they come up to me, are like, 'Did we go to high school together? Or did I make out with you at sleepaway camp?' And oftentimes, yes, that is the answer, because I went to a giant high school and made out with everybody.

I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.

I was a jock in college and high school, but I didn't hang out with the jocks. I was sort of a nerd who didn't look like a nerd. I never really fit into any social set.

When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school, so I didn't have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here, I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me.

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.

That's the great thing about university: you've got people around you who are taking a risk and trying things out themselves. It gives you the confidence to try and take it to the next step, which was drama school.

I'm the first to admit I've had a sheltered life. I grew up in the country and went to a boarding school. It was all just part of the business - be nice to everyone and all that.

During my time at Watchung Hills Regional High School, I was fortunate to have a number of teachers who inspired me and filled me with enthusiasm for learning.

Your chemistry high school teacher lied to you when they told you that there was such a thing as a vacuum, that you could take space and move every particle out of it.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn't like that.

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

I mean, the acting school I went to, we did have a social experience, but you know, when it's a bunch of actors, it's everyone self-consciously having a social experience rather than just having a social experience.

I feel like a lot of my past career was going to film school, making a lot of different kinds of movies. I made a bunch of comedies, I made one drama and I made a couple musicals.

I ran track. I ran cross country. But I did not play organized basketball in high school, at least on our team. But I played a lot of sports.

The reason why I found acting is because my father passed away. He passed away really young. I was going to go to med school. My father's dream was that all of his kids become doctors. I realized in school I didn't like it. When he died, it was like a wake-up call. Life is too short to do something you don't want to do.

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.

I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.

I want to finish high school, but that will be it.

You can decide at 17 that you want to be a professional player. In Argentina, they start very young. They go to school in the morning and then do polo in the afternoon.

Prom has all the elements of a popular story. It reeks of all-Americanness, tension, drama. It has romance. Pretty dresses. Dancing. Limos. High school. Coming of age.

My parents homeschooled my sister and me for many years. Why? Because the local school insisted that I, being three, should go to preschool, and my sister, being five, should go to kindergarten. The problem? You learn your alphabet in preschool, and I was already reading chapter books.

We're used to the characteristics of social media - participation, connection, instant gratification - and when school doesn't offer the same, it's easy to tune out.

Age 10. I joined the school marching band as a drummer.

One of the things I learned in law school is that there's nothing wrong or undesirable or dishonorable or destructive about amending the Constitution.

I used to get a lift to school every day with a man who was a major in the British Army.

When you think about little league football, high school, and even on to college even more so, you're dealing with a lot of guys that are prideful, that think they're the best - a lot of alpha males. So, typically, you've got to have a guy that can control those guys, and, when he talks, they know he means business. He's a serious guy.

A church is an incubator, a nursery, a grade school. You start where people are and move them to where they need to be.

I have been a performer for as long as I can remember. I performed in Sunday school and church plays.

If you really want to be a music producer, stop watching 'Friends' when you get home from school. Start trying to make music. If you're not going to try, then it's impossible. When you try, it's always possible.

The mosque was the neighbourhood house of worship, but it was also the place where my high school friends and I came to study.

At 12 I dropped out of school but I had lost interest in it at a much earlier age. For me, school was very very stressful.

I didn't want to go to college or work in an office or have a nine-to-five job. I knew that quite clearly before I left school.

There was a year between school and getting going as an actor when I basically just watched films. Video shops were the new thing, and there was a good one round the corner and me and my brother just watched everything, from the horror to the European art-house.

I would love, more than anything, to do an out-and-out farce with huge physical energy. Just because you're from the minimalist school, it doesn't mean you can't go big.

I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.

I had teachers in high school to point me in the direction of the University of Indiana School of Music, and after IU, I went on to study at the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia. I graduated in 2006.

I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick around because they're boring. If they're boring, they go away.

I noticed, when I taught elementary school, how true the squeaky wheel thing is, and how endearing squeaky wheels can be! Because when you're being a squeaky wheel, you're also really letting people know who you are.

I grew up in a town with a great wrestling tradition. Then I was a team sport queen in high school, I played softball, volleyball, and soccer. Oh, and I also did ski racing.

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole.

Dartmouth is a small school with high-caliber teaching. Our classes were all taught by professors, not teaching assistants. I felt like that was a school where I could make a big splash. The opportunities would be grander and more robust for me there than at a school with 40,000 students.

For a little while, my mom was a school teacher. And I went to the school that she taught.

I acted out a lot. I was very nerdy. I was very isolated, which I made up for by kind of talking and trying to entertain people and get them to like me, so I did theatre and improv in high school and college, but always as a hobby.

I didn't mind being in a school with a small African-American population. The African-American-community was very tight, and that was great. But I also wanted to interact with other types of folks.

I hated, when I was a kid, being told that 'Black people don't do that.' And the white kids at school didn't accept me because I was black, and the black kids in my neighborhood didn't accept me because they thought I thought I was white.

I went to private school for two years, then Aptos Middle School, and I finished at McAteer. Several of my classmates at those schools are my friends today.

My parents were vegetarians. I'd show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.

I'm not the coolest person in the world. I'm not the sexiest Diva or the strongest Diva. I know who I am. I'm not the most popular person, and I'm kind of dorky, and I'm someone you can see at your school or as your neighbor, and I think people like that.

I've always wanted to entertain people, and when I was in school, I was interested in creative writing, but wrestling was always there. When I ran into financial problems, I just figured when life gives you lemons, you have to make lemonade.

I've been performing since I was a child, my mother would have to pull me aside and tell me that I wasn't onstage. I was a cheerleader, president of choir, and in the school play.

I've always had strong ties with Delhi, and I do stay in touch with my friends and periodically visit the capital. I started my schooling at St. Columbus High School before I went to Mayo College. Delhi, for me, is a historical city with all its beautiful monuments.

Mayo College, where I got my grounding, is a private boarding school. It is a traditional school with brilliant teachers including some from overseas.

Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.

My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren't rich - but we felt secure.

You tell me one other person that graduated from Yale that is as inarticulate as Bush. Yale's a great school, and here's this idiot.

I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?

I won vice president of my student body in high school. That doesn't mean anything.

Not graduating high school on time leads to fewer chances of attending college and obtaining good paying jobs, and creates instead higher chances of incarceration and unemployment.

The right wing always mobilizes around constitutional amendments: the right to bear arms, school prayer.

Looking so cool, his greed is hard to conceal, he's fresh out of law school, you gave him a license to steal.

People that were a little nerdy in high school would look up to me and know it gets better.

I was the weirdest kid: I wanted to see the police file - in grade school! I was convinced I could crack the case if I just had that file.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

I hated high school. It was a prison.

When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts, you can't be interested in science.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

The same independence that got me into trouble in high school got me praise in college.

We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.

When I was 14 or 15, a camp counselor told me I was smart. I had never been very good in school, but he told me once that I was smart but my mind operated a little differently.

When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today, and it's called the Internet.

I only started concentrating on football as a career when I left school at 18. I played golf for the Scottish and British boys' teams.

My high school years were fun and frustrating, typical of the teen years. The most important accomplishment was meeting my wife, Ruth.

I was a high school throw-out.

I was a dummy in school.

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn't really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago.

But when I was selected, after my very first tour of squadron duty, to become one of the youngest candidates for the test pilot school, I began to realize, maybe you are a little bit better.

I think the sense of family and family achievement, plus the discipline which I received there from that one-room school were really very helpful in what I did later on.

Of course, in our grade school, in those days, there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess.

I have always been an honest trader. I come from a school of traders where there was honour in the deal. No contracts, just a handshake and that's it, done. That's the way I prefer to do business but it's not always possible these days, sadly.

I live with some of my best friends from high school, very commune-like, in my house. It's my hippie way of life.

The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.

I guess I was the class clown - with a name like Albert Einstein, you don't hide in the back. I'd read the school bulletin to the class, and I'd add activities and make stuff up. It was good, a good 10 minutes every morning.

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.

I was always made to work at a very early age. I finished school at 4 P.M. and by 5 P.M. I was working. It was seven days a week.

After boarding school in Switzerland, at, like, 14 or 15, my life clicked, and I just realized, 'I don't want to be like anyone around me at my school. I don't think the world revolves around money.'

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal, society can not exist unless it goes on.

I graduated in 1930 and I went up to the Yale Drama School for two years.

When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.

I got involved in athletics during physical education lessons at school.

If I had to do a lot of promotion as a kid, it would have been very intense. I'm really glad I got to go through high school, have a college experience, and have the last five years since then, just... being a person.

I was in college in Washington, D.C. I did three years full-time. I did all my requirements, and my senior year was really a gut year. And I said, 'Law school will always be there.' I was in no hurry to get right into that.

My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. My father broke his hand on a guy's head once in school.

My brother is an electrical engineer and went to computer science grad school at Stanford, and he'd tell me stories about the happy hours he'd organize.

I never wanted to study art. And I don't think you need to study art if you are an artist. It's even dangerous to go to school. You need to do whatever you want, as you want.

Having arrived in London to seek refuge during the civil war in Sudan, where I was born, the thing I'm most proud of is having totally evolved. I came here not knowing how to speak English, but I went to school and learned, I adapted to this new culture.

I was working part-time as a cleaner while I was going to college and then babysitting after school.

London is like my second home. I've still got friends there from school and from when I first started in the modelling business - people such as Karen Elson, Jasmine Guinness, Jade Parfitt.

When I was 14, I came to school in London. I remember it was very cold, but also having to adjust and become fluent in English.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

I was the child who would leave school and take her clothes off the second I got into the house. I made my mom buy me lingerie when I was 5 years old. I was a sicko. My mother must have been mortified.

Well, I've never been in a touring rock band, it was all just high school and college, playing toga parties in frat houses.

I wanted to get through high school anonymously.

In second grade, I told a bunch of kids there was a homeless person living between the portable classrooms outside our school. It caused panic, and the principal had to announce on the P.A. system that no one was living there. I pretended I didn't know who started the rumor.

When I was in Taiwan, I was taught in school that Taiwan is part of China.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

I crushed high school. I was a huge dork.

Even when I was at school, I wanted to be liked by everyone, even the bullies. I didn't like them, but I needed to know that they liked me.

I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.

I'm the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys' school in Sydney.

I've learned by watching films that inspired me and people who inspired me like Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I love old school acting. I love subtlety, and I also love being spontaneous, and that's really what works for me.

When I entered the pros, I was a young kid in the major leagues. I was 18 years old, right out of high school. I thought I knew everything, and I clearly didn't.

Most of the Amazon basin is as flat as a pancake and laced with extravagantly meandering waterways. One school of thought holds that more than 145 million years ago, when Africa and South America were joined, the Amazon's main stem was connected to the Niger River and actually flowed in the opposite direction, toward the Pacific Ocean.

We had to take off our shoes after school to save wear on the soles.

Songwriters always reminded me of that kid at school who would go around with his guitar, like, 'Yeah, songwritin' man,' looking wistful. That wasn't me - those kinds of people put me off. In the early days, I'd write a bunch of lyrics and almost look at them as a sort of joke, to make the rest of the boys laugh.

You don't meet that many people that you can talk about Roots Manuva with, but that was my favorite in school, this record of his called 'Run Come Save Me.' When I first started writing lyrics, it came from that.

At school, a careers adviser asked me what I wanted to be, and I said 'fashion journalist,' so writing for 'Vogue' has provided me with the opportunity to fulfill a dream.

Having to go back and forth between school and filming would sometimes be frustrating because I loved school. It was my chance to be around other people my age. But when you're leaving school to go to a set that's filled with kids your age, then it's fine.

The Internet has become a tool to pick on people and ruin someone's life. I don't think parents realize what's going on. Just because you're not at school doesn't mean kids aren't harassing you on the computer.

There will always be someone being picked on at school, and it's not going to go away.

When I was younger, I used to play mind games in which I'd try to finish tasks in minutes. My favorite was when I would shower, lay out my school clothes, then devour my dinner - in 15 minutes flat.

Without any formal personal finance instruction in our high school or college curricula, many college seniors who graduate in the red will continue to make common financial mistakes that only exacerbate their debt burdens.

My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.

When I'm identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. 'Did you go to school for it?' someone asks. 'Yes,' I say. 'Where?' they ask, because I don't usually offer it. 'I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' I say.

I started out as a Cold Warrior, even my last years in grade school.

I have been skiing since I was in school, but I'm not great. I am never going to break an Olympic record, I just want to go down the hills, on red or blue runs, but not... black.

You know, when you go to high school or, you know, when kids are younger and there's not an understanding of differences. But I built up a very strong, thick skin.

At one school I visited, everyone had read 'Halo,' and they were all dressed up as angels - with halos!

I never thought about writing a novel until I was 13, and that happened by chance. I was on school holidays, and I was bored, and I thought I just wanted to do something to occupy myself instead of asking, 'What can I do, mum? Entertain me.' I started, and it really just took over, and I realised, 'Wow, this is an amazing experience.'

'As the World Turns' was such a great experience and such a great school for me. It was better than any class I could have ever taken.

I went to an all-girls school for part of high school, and the idea of boys was amazing to me, like, all I ever wanted to do was kiss boys and be around boys.

When I started binge-watching TV, when that became a thing due to Netflix a few years ago, the first thing I watched was 'Lost.' It was summer break from grad school, and I watched it all in a row, like as many hours a day as I could, as though I were clocking in at a job.

Sometimes people come out of school right now and they immediately want a job doing something. And there's nothing wrong with just listening and learning and watching.

I was crazy for music as a high school kid and a college kid.

I went to stage school with a neighbor to build confidence because I was quite shy.

Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being 'different' will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why.

I would hate to be in high school now. Psychologists talk about the 'imaginary audience' that teens seem to feel they have around them and that makes them think they have to keep up their image all the time. Now with Facebook and MySpace and 24/7 online access, that imaginary audience has become real.