I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
I'm a New Yorker, originally. I was raised in Jackson Heights. I went to P.S. 148 and then Newtown High School. If World War II didn't come, I'd still be there in school. World War II saved me.
I did a severe amount of plays in high school. I was in every single show that my drama club produced. Then in the summer I would do plays, and I was also playing sports. I was probably a hellish kid, come to think of it, for my parents' schedule. But then I went to college in North Carolina.
The idea of going back to school and revising for exams would be hellish. As an actor, my form of revising is learning scenes, but to start going through biology, chemistry, and all of those sciences would be just a nightmare.
I remember failing reading in school at a young age, and you just kinda get left behind and I felt helpless.
I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.
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 felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.
I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.
I ushered at the Shubert in New Haven during graduate school when plays en route to Broadway still went out of town to try out. I worked backstage at summer stock doing jobs from garbage man to strapping on Herbert Marshall's wooden leg to fixing Gloria Swanson's broken plumbing in her dressing room with her yelling at me as I worked the plunger.
There's a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.
I was like a hermit; I didn't really have a lot of homies I would kick it with. I was in high school, I was failing all my classes, and I wanted to make music.
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
When you're a kid, right, and you're surrounded by all these other kids, and let's say they don't have the same interests or the same goals or the same world view as you... It's difficult because a child doesn't know that there's another way. A child doesn't know that there's another place outside of the systems and hierarchies in school.
I've seen so many kids walking to school with these massive high energy drinks, and they are nine or 10. I'm like, 'What?' It was a treat for me. It is still a treat for my family.
When I first stopped going to high school, I was about 15, 16. It had to be, like, 2000, 2001.
Akron, Ohio, is my home. I will always be here. I'm still working out at my old high school.
When I was a model - and I was all during high school and college - you always wanted to be on the cover of a magazine. That's how your success was judged. The more cover, the better.
I just think winners win. And guys who won all the way through high school and college, the best player at every level, they have a way of making things happen and winning games.
When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.
