My old school hip-hop would probably consist of Bad N-Fluenz, The Dangerous Crew, Seagrams, Mr. ILL, RBL Posse, Rappin' 4-Tay.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.
I didn't want to be in high school. I didn't want to go to grade school. I wanted to learn rock n' roll and paint pictures and throw pots and write haiku and study film.
In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
Journalists like to say I started off sweeping the pottery floors. But it was just a short-lived part time job doing that after I left school.
Before I was a year old I walked and talked and I was even potty trained. When I started going to school I think I got on everyone's nerves because I used to ask adult questions rather than settle for the stuff usually fed to kids.
I was, like, forty at birth. When I wasn't even a year old, I spoke, I was potty trained, I walked and talked. That was it. Then I started school and drove everybody crazy because they realized I had popped out as an adult. I had adult questions and wanted adult answers.
I actually think the reason I am interested in certain parts is because I was such a dweeb in high school. When you are such a loser, it's a helpful way in to a lot of characters because even very powerful people are not all that powerful, really.
School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect. But nobody's perfect, so why practice?
School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect and nobody's perfect so why bother.
When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.
I live in Indiana and teach at Purdue University, a wonderful school with some of the brightest students I have ever had the privilege of working with. My colleagues are powerful and intelligent and kind. The cost of living is low, the prairie is wide, and on clear nights, I can see all the stars in the sky above.
When I was in school I used to prank my teachers all the time. But I was really, really nice. I love to make people laugh. And even in those pranks, the teachers would laugh most of the time.
It's not like I grew up playing pranks on people, and I was not that girl in school.
I have a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, so I write when they are at school and pre-school, or when I have a babysitter.
Drugs are in every walk of life - doctors, lawyers, preachers, the guy who works for IBM, teenagers on the street, teenagers in school.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Growing up in New Orleans, I was always the only black kid, or one of two, on the school soccer team. While I was always conscious of this status, what took precedent was my unfettered love of the game.
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.
I happen to believe that the preemption school is correct, that the risks of allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire his weapons will only grow with time.
