I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer.
My favorite play in drama school was 'The Bacchae.' It's about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy - it's related to the word 'bacchanal' - and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.
When eventually I started to act a bit more, I realised that circus school had taught me something that a lot of actors my age didn't have: physicality. They didn't know how to move. Acting is not all about talking. There is something animalistic about it.
I learned how to do stop-frame animation and I experimented with that a lot, and pretty much that was my mode of animating through high school.
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough.
I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.
When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.
I went to an amazing school in Brooklyn called St. Anne's that's a really kind of creative hot bed.
After attending The Dalton School and then Vassar College, I began cooking in New York City restaurants helmed by Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal and Thomas Keller.
I've been inside the Anne Frank house. You've only read about Anne Frank in grade school. I've been in it. I've seen the diary. Things that teachers couldn't teach you.
I always dressed as a man when I was at school. I loved wearing a tie and a shirt, and I was always wearing suits. Annie Lennox was my hero. I was always playing men in high school.
I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here.
On my first day at Yale Law School, there were posters in the hallways announcing an event with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. I couldn't believe it: Tony Blair was speaking to a room of a few dozen students? If he came to Ohio State, he would have filled an auditorium of a thousand people.
I remember bringing some of my other friends to our table, and everyone at our table would look at them and ask me, 'What are you doing? Why'd you bring him?' It was annoying high school stuff that still goes on now. My high school was really bad.
I'd never been to a prom, I had never had the whole high school experience. I think I was kind of an anomaly. I don't think they knew where to put me.
In my kids' school, the married family is an anomaly... which I do think is sad. I do believe in marriage.
I wanted to get through high school anonymously.
It started in middle school. Once, a group of girls locked me in the janitor's closet. Another time, a girl spilled chocolate milk down a dress I made. Girls would try to trip me in the hallway.
I grew up in New York City. In elementary school, I was a charter member of the Scribble Scrabble Club, and in high school, my poems were published in an anthology of student poetry.
One day I was in school, and the next I was acting opposite Jeremy Irons. That's how quickly it happened. I was in class and then working with Sir Anthony Hopkins.
