It's been a twisty-turny path for me. I was studying to be a history professor, and then I left that, went to film school, and tried to be like my heroes, like, Spike Lee and Hal Hartly.
From 1949 to 1953, I studied towards the diploma in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Polytechnical School in Zurich. It is in the last year of this study that I made my first contacts with fundamental research, when working on the isolation and characterization of a new isomer of Cl34 with a half-life of 1.5 seconds.
I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare;' I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning;' I say I 'passed a school'.
I was the hallway clown in high school.
I knew Slash in high school, but not very well. Just knew him as this kid that used to hang out in the hallway. Pretty much looked then the way he does now.
I went to school in Massachusetts at Hampshire College.
I moved to Seattle when I was two or three years old. Had my early education there, and would spend summers on the farm in Maryland. Then I went to boarding school in New Hampshire, to St. Paul's School. From there, I moved to London.
I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.
At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.
My older sister Nikki went to Hampton music school in Virginia, then to another school later in New York.
I'm very obsessed with pop culture of the mid-century and it goes hand-in-hand with the music that I studied in school.
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 used to write stories. Handwriting stories in school were a big deal for me. That's kind of what I did.
I just hate sitting and writing - I had to do that in school. Plus, I have terrible handwriting.
My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
It is really important that focusing on things such as spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting doesn't inhibit the creative flow. When I was at school there was a huge focus on copying and testing and it put me off words and stories for years.
Growing up in high school, I wasn't hanging out with friends every day or on the weekends. Doing normal high school kid things was something I was willing to give up.
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
There were only 75 people in my graduating class at the school I attended in Hannah, S.C. It was a small school and that translated into not a lot of opportunities when it came to music. We had academic and sports programs but we never had a consistent music program. We would have a band one year, and a chorus one year, but nothing ever lasted.
I went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance.
