academic struggle Quotes

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.

I was a very earnest, hard working boy at school, but my parents were distressed because I was always bottom of the class. But I wasn't dilatory, I worked like crazy.

My brother was older, very bright. He went to university. I wasn't academically bright - maybe at first, when I was little, but it was lost. I started doing a drama workshop and got really into it, then I did a BTec in performing arts and started to work.

I dropped out of college for the last time in 1977.

I tried to go to college, I barely got out of high school.

My mother was a big influence. She kept pushing me because I was very shy and inhibited. And schoolwork was very difficult for me because I couldn't concentrate. I was failing almost every subject. To this day, I'm not too good at reading a book. But I was the president of my high school comedy group, and they treated me like a king.

I did fine in school. School was cool until I started personally rebelling.

I was perhaps the worst student you have ever seen. You know, I thought I was stupid, all my classmates thought I was stupid, so there was general agreement.

For me, school was a nightmare. I struggled.

I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.

When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'

College wasn't for us. We just didn't have the attention span.

I was always behind in class. There was people in my class who was amazing at art, amazing at maths, amazing at English, but I wasn't clever with anything, even though I tried my hardest.

I was a class clown, never got good grades.

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

I have an I.Q. of 100 plus a little bit. I have to work real hard to get things when I read.

Children don't drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official.

When I turned 15, I left school having failed to make the minimum grade. With little direction I enlisted at the local culinary school. Here the academic demands were less rigorous.

When I went to do law, I kind of drifted through that and thought, 'I can pass these exams.' And I didn't - I failed three times, and each time I did worse and failed by a bigger margin. And that taught me so much.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

When I was homeschooled, I fell so behind - months behind at school - because I'm not good at keeping up. And so I had to sit down for literally three weeks to a month and just do all of it. And it was not fun, and I didn't want to do it, but I had to.

I wasn't the best student. I wasn't stupid, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention.

I would leave school and go to my theater class, and that's when I'd actually sit down and listen. I wouldn't pay attention in school, or I'd sing in class and get in trouble - I'd always get in trouble. Theater is the only thing I always came back to.

I'm taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I'm taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can't tell you how much it's not me.

When I realized I was having trouble reading, I was too embarrassed to ask for help. Some teachers believed in me, but I just wasn't focused on school - I was into the music and trying to please my dad.