Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
I went to UC Berkeley. I graduated in 1976, immediately moved to L.A. with a degree in English - which did no more for you then than it does for you now - then sold real estate and did theater for nine years.
[Degree in English] gave me a little more self-confidence, to know that I'd managed to complete something like that.
I always loved movies as a child, and I love story. I got my degree in English. Film and story seemed, to me, the vector of the movie business. I really didn't know what 'the film business' meant, but I decided I wanted to be in it.
I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].
At 27 or so I thought, you know, I actually do really want to make money and have a proper life, and I don't want to be a loser. I know! I'll go to university and get a proper degree and maybe get a job in media... I went and did an English degree.
I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.
I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism.
I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.
I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.
I started going to Ohio University when I was in my mid-thirties, ended up with an English degree when I was forty.
