Academic Roots Quotes

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

Becoming a model was very counter-culture for my background, which is hyper-liberal, academic and feminist.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

I had a teacher's degree and a degree in Oriental Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts. I thought I was going to India to study but all of a sudden, I had a career in music. It really surprised me.

My background is in theoretical physics, and it's something very close to my heart.

I'm indebted to the teachers who shaped me - from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John's in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.

My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

I studied Shakespeare all through high school. Both of my parents teach English and history, so it has always been around my experience as a young man.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology.

I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it.

I had had a classical education prior to that.

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.

Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, I didn't have a deep liberal arts background. So we'd go to lunch and people would talk about their favorite seventeenth-century poets, and I'd be thinking, 'Could I even name five poets? From any century?'

I was nuts for stuff in the Middle Ages when I was just in the third and fourth grades.