After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.
I would have been a visual artist. When I was in high school, that was one of the things... I had to make a decision what I was going to go to college for, and at the time, I also painted and sculpted. I got more attention for my performing, so I thought that was a better idea.
I've always been attracted to ensembles. When I started doing plays in high school and in college, I always loved the community aspect of it. I loved these little families that would develop.
I was an English major in college, though I ended up getting my degree in "General Stduies" because my grades were too bad to qualify for an English degree.
I read an awful lot in college - a lot of Dickens, a lot of 19th century American stuff, a lot of old mysteries. Maybe it's helped me attain a certain fluidity with my style.
I know that asshole you were with in college --” “Can we leave that asshole out of it?” Please, gentlemen, one asshole at a time.
I studied cooking in Spain after college.
I've never been to college, and I think about that. But I kept putting it off, and I am also thinking about having a child, and that's really important. Also, I want to do a lot of traveling and surfing - two of my hobbies.
I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.
A college joke to cure the dumps.
Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.
But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral.
Another big difference about not being in college: In college, you're on the team, you're competing for the NCAA - luckily I had a full scholarship and I was taken care of - then all of a sudden you're a pro and you've got to take care of yourself. I'm gonna keep doing the same thing, keep training, and hopefully everything works out.
It was definitely a big change in my life going from the college scene to really kind of being on my own. I got married and moved to Houston and started a whole new journey. It was scary in a way, but what's great for me is just focusing on gymnastics and my wife. I'm really able to put 100% into what my goals are.
In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.
One of the greatest moments of my career was on the road promoting 'Superbad' with Michael Cera and Chris Mintz-Plasse. We were showing the movie at colleges.
Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he's lecturing us about how America's gone "soft"? Really?
One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.
But you're never taught in schools - we don't teach anyone in public schools that government is the problem. We don't teach anyone in college that government is the problem - except maybe a handful of sort of unique, conservative schools. But mainstream media never talks as if government is the problem.
I studied physics at Princeton when I was a college student, and my initial intention was to major in it but to also be a writer. What I discovered, because it was a very high-powered physics program with its own fusion reactor, was that to keep up with my fellow students in that program I would need to dedicate myself to math and physics all the time and let writing go. And I couldn't let writing go, so I let physics go and became a science fan and a storyteller.
Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.
We were with Hayden Schlossberg enormous fans of that first American Pie. We were in college when it came out, and we watched it over and over and over again.
Justin [Di Cioccio] was [at Laguardia School of Arts]. He later took over at Manhattan. But I knew Justin through the McDonald's band, which at the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I got involved with. I was not that heavily involved with the school at MSM my first year there. I took a semester off to start my 2nd year. Took classes I felt like taking during my third semester, but by the start of my third year, September of '86, they began the undergraduate jazz program and I joined that program.
I left school December of 1988. I was 21 at the time. And I hadn't quite finished my degree because I had done eight semesters, not understanding that I was going to have to finish the degree without the TAPP and Pell grant money that I had been using towards paying for much of my college tuition. And I didn't have any money. So I said, "Alright." And circumstances there were such that I thought it was maybe time to move on anyway.
I didn't always have time to practice as much as I wanted to do, that was a real problem for me in high school and college.