It always annoys me when stars grumble about fans coming up to them in the street. I love it. These young stars today with all their airs and graces, they need to remember it is an honour and a privilege to make money from acting. How hard is it?
My mother and father just taught me the basics: to be really kind, to really listen to people. I have never been one to put on airs and graces.
I am very humble, and I am very gracious and very grateful for everything that happens to me and about me and around me.
Show me a good and gracious loser and I'll show you a failure.
If somebody is gracious enough to give me a second chance, I won't need a third.
The Academy and the Oscars have been very gracious to me.
All the ladies can feel sexy and have fun in my clothing and that makes me feel like I am offering something truly unique to the people who have been gracious enough to show me such love and support over the years.
Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.
I tried a few grad school programs because I didn't know how to make it... Eventually, I was desperate for a job, and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington, D.C., called 'The Hill.' Even though my interest in politics wasn't huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.
If you had asked me back in grade school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said my first choice was an actor, but if I couldn't be that, I'd want to be a superhero.
There was no professional basketball for me in the United States when I was in grade school and middle school. I could look to the Olympics and college basketball, but that was only on TV for the Final Four.
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.
When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn't be playing football.
My grades put me in about 5,000th place in all of South Korea. If I kept going down that path, I would've become a successful man with a regular job. However, I was positive I'd be number one in the country as a rapper. So I asked my mother whether she wanted to have a son who was a first-place rapper, or a 5,000th-place student.
I would not recommend a teen getting into modeling if they're not solid when it comes to their grades and school. That comes first. My mother always told me that came first.
I've just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.
For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.
When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.
But I decided I wanted more education and I had to make a choice between starting law school, which was interesting to me, and going for a graduate degree in engineering.
I have a graduate degree from Penn State. I studied at Penn State under a noted Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. I had an interest in thrillers, and it occurred to me that Hemingway wrote many action scenes: the war scenes in 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' come to mind. But the scenes don't feel pulpy.
