I push myself hard. I don't like pain, exactly, but as a ballerina, I lived in constant pain. At ballet school in Stockholm, I remember we had a locker where if someone had been to the doctor and gotten painkillers, we divided them among us. In a sense, we were all addicted.
My grandmother Dora taught me how to cook. She's from a small town in West Virginia called Milton. I would pull a stool up to her kitchen counter after school. My love of food started there.
I'd wanted to be a director since I was five and had been making videos since I was a kid. Then YouTube came around during high school. I was making videos, and it was just a place to put them, like storage.
I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.
I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.
In high school and college, I always, always straightened my hair. Don't ask why; I was just so into my image. Post-college, I started wearing my hair natural.
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.
I grew up in Bushwick, and I lived with my mom. She was a single parent with three kids. I've got an older brother and a younger sister. We all were pretty active kids, but school wasn't particularly our strong suit; we were always good at other things.
I struggled to get through high school. I didn't get to go to college. But it made me realize you can do anything if you want to bad enough.
I wasn't some stud athlete at school that was destined to be a professional wrestler. I was just an insecure little guy that didn't want to go to school because I had zits on my upper lip.
I was a great student at a great school, Wharton School of Finance.
I went to the Wharton School of Finance, the toughest place to get into. I was a great student.
I won vice president of my student body in high school. That doesn't mean anything.
My husband was working as principal of an urban transformation high school - the kind of public charter school determined to do whatever it takes to give its mostly minority, low-income student body the education they need and deserve to be successful in life.
At Horace Mann High School in affluent Riverdale, New York, one of the top schools in the country, those who receive double time on tests are plentiful enough to qualify as their own segment of the student body. Known to their peers as 2Ts, they participate in the same activities, get the same grades, and attend the same range of colleges.
I was the class clown, but I was also student body president in high school.
I was in the drama club, and I was one of seven co-presidents of the student body. Students elected me; I don't know why! There were only 330 kids in my high school, though, so it wasn't a lot of kids to impress or reign over.
I had done student films for the School Of Visual Arts and for NYU and all these schools in New York, so those were my first film experiences, but they were student films, so I guess they don't really count.
Throughout elementary and middle school, I was used to hearing other words: Smart. Studious. Well-spoken. Well-read. They became pillars of my self-confidence, enabling me to build myself up on what I contributed rather than what I looked like.
