We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.

You've got to do your homework, and you've got to look at what makes people successful, what makes penalty takers unsuccessful. Ultimately, they're the ones kicking it, so how can you transfer the pressure on to them? How can you disrupt their pattern to make it difficult?

I feel sorry for kids these days. They get so much homework. Remember the days when we put a belt around our two books and carried them home? Now they're dragging a suitcase. They have school all day, then homework from six until eleven. There's no time left to be creative.

I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.

My life was going to school, having a snack and going outside to play hockey until dinner time. I would then do my homework and go back out to play, but only if the Canadiens weren't playing that night. That's what I did every day, whether it was street hockey or pond hockey.

I was in seventh grade at St. Matthew's. The teachers would tell me, 'God loves you,' and then whack a ruler across my hand. 'Well,' I'd say, 'if God loves me, can you call God? Can you ask Him if it's all right that I didn't do my homework? If it's not, then let Him hit me.'

I'd get out at school at 3:00 P.M., show up to dance practice at 6:30 P.M., practice for three hours till 9:00 P.M., get home at midnight, and try to do whatever homework I could before getting back up for 7:00 A.M. But I did it because I liked dancing, and I loved the music.

When I've least expected it, an enormous opportunity or stroke of luck has crossed right under my nose. So I tell everybody, if you're passionate about what you do and you love it, do it. But do your homework. Because you'll never know when the opportunity is going to happen.

My parents took me to Sam Ash, and I got a pretty cheap setup - a MIDI keyboard and one of those cheaper mixers - but it was dope, though; it was something. That was kind of how it was: just going to school, skating back home, making music, telling my parents I did my homework.

I read 'On The Road' in college. I was 18 or 19, and I had a particular quarter where I was taking biology, calculus, and physics. Those were my three classes. It wasn't a well-rounded schedule at all. It was hard, hard work, all the time - hours and hours and hours of homework.

School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn. Math is just the worst. To this day, I can't concentrate on it. People always say, 'You should have tried harder.' But actually, I cheated a lot because I could not sit and do homework.

My mother was a high-strung perfectionist. She would check my homework for the slightest imperfection and demand that it be redone if she detected any flaws, which she invariably did. My father, in contrast, was easy going and affable and delighted in helping me with any project.

I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.

Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

Unfortunately, like, homework and school wasn't the thing that I was obsessing over. It was, you know, music and making music and how to like - and drum machines. And we met Rick Rubin, and Rick Rubin had a drum machine. So I would just cut school and go to his house - his dorm room.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

The thing to remember about Obama is he doesn't care if you like him or I like him or somebody else does. He literally would rather do homework with his kids than be around other politicians. Does this make him unpopular at times? Yes. Does it make him ineffective? Most certainly not.

The funniest memory that I can recall about my school days has to be one incident that involved unfinished homework for numerous days. I didn't do any of my homework for days and days at a stretch, and kept stalling my teacher that I was extremely unwell and was under heavy medication.

The one I really get on with is Princess Anne. Talk about calls a spade a shovel! And she's so clued-up. She's a patron of a number of charities. I've been involved in a couple and she's not just a name. She knows the research programmes that are going on. She really does her homework.

At age eleven, I became a member of the circulating library of my home town. From there on I was rarely seen outside but was reading two to four books per week, the subjects ranging from archaeology over ethnology and geography to zoology. Needless to say that I did not do much homework.

I get 'The New Yorker,' and I'm usually about three issues behind. But I do catch up. The problem is that it always seems like homework, but then you start reading it and go, 'Why am I not doing this all the time? These are such great stories!' But, yeah, that stack gets so big and dense.

To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives, so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single one.

When I was young, you went to school, dealt with your friends and drama, went home, did your homework, went to bed, and started over the next day. But that social interaction that happens at school doesn't end now - it goes until the minute you go to bed and starts again when you wake up.

To me, it's so much about doing your homework, going into a situation, getting to know the subject, making them feel comfortable, getting intimate access, getting access to all different aspects of people's lives so that I am essentially telling an entire story and not just a single image.

To say what I would have been if I wasn't boxing, I don't know why, but I always wanted to be an x-ray technician or a substitute teacher. Those two occupations always stuck with me, maybe because my substitute teacher didn't give us homework, or because I've always had x-rays of my hands.

Sadly, I do my homework. I've a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I'll read C. Fred Bergsten's defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It's embarrassing to admit.

If politics were a high school movie, Republicans would be the jocks and mean girls locking hapless freshmen inside their lockers and threatening to call in their rich parents if the teachers complain - plus the broke kids who are always willing to strong-arm homework for them from the nerds.

Kids have no sense of appropriateness. They can ask me whatever they want. You do develop a sense of intimacy with readers, and they tell you things about themselves. During a school year, I'll get e-mails asking about the books. I'll give them information, but I won't do their homework for them.

I always panic on the first day of work. You can do all the Stanislavsky-backstory homework, but when that moment arrives and you are in the clothes, hair, and makeup of somebody else, and you're saying the words created by somebody else - I never know how to do it. It's a complete mystery to me.

Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written 'Eragon' if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework - I wouldn't have had the time to write.

My mother worked at the telephone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night. Evenings, she took classes when she could at University of Maryland's University College, bringing me along to do homework while she studied to get the degree she hoped would offer her and me greater opportunities.

I love to work. I know that sounds ridiculous to say because all people love to work, but I love the homework that goes into acting. I love figuring out different ways of playing a scene. I love the energy of being on set. I love not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.

Growing up, I ate, slept and breathed hockey. I got home from school, I shot pucks, played outdoor hockey, road hockey, go home for dinner... Remember this is pre-Internet, barely any video games, I had a Commodore Vic-20. If you weren't doing your homework, you were outside playing hockey, most likely.

I always thought that the fastest way for me to get ahead and get noticed and to do well was to make my act very accessible. When I first started, I talked about family stuff, my dog, my cat. It was all I knew back then; I wasn't forcing anything, but I wasn't like, 'Hey, don't you hate doing homework?'

In my home state of Delaware, we've done our homework and worked hard and, as a result, we've made great strides in cleaning up our own air pollution. Unfortunately, a number of the upwind states to the west of us have not made the same commitment to reducing harmful pollution by investing in cleaner air.

Technologically we can deliver the ability of parents to be able to log into a school intranet, be able to see what homework has been set or look at lesson planning, whether the child is attending, see what the timetable is like, all of that is possible and there are some schools that are doing it already.

It seems like journalism over here in UK, in general, is at a higher level: not overrun by all these teeny little blogs. There's more of a historical context for it or something. It seems like people review something or take a listen to something and they really do their homework. That's just what it seems like.

I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.

The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework.

I give myself homework when I have an audition. I give myself goals, and that's how I check how I'm doing. It can be something simple like 'listen,' or 'find your feet.' And then afterward it's an assessment, so in a way it's not about booking the job or not. It's about what I learned as an actor about that character.

I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.

I was in a form of a prison: not necessarily with bars, but I was locked to that machine three days a week, and I couldn't plan work, I couldn't plan vacations, I couldn't plan dinner, I couldn't plan homework, I couldn't plan nothing because at the end of the day, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I had to be at dialysis.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

My earliest memories of my mom were of her multi-tasking - preparing dinner while checking on homework and housework; clearing the dinner plates while setting out bowls for breakfast; making sure we ate our breakfast while lining up bread, lunch meats, apples, and snacks assembly-line style so we could make our lunches.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

Peter Parker is probably the most relatable superhero - maybe ever - because he goes through something that basically everyone has to go through. Whether it's puberty or talking to girls or doing homework, he does it in such a human way. That's why he's such a beloved character: because so many people can relate to him.

The book that blew the doors off the house, grabbing me with its breathtakingly deep and irresistible view of the universe and our relation to it, was 'Intelligent Life in the Universe' by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. I recall an enchanting all-nighter completing a college homework assignment to read the first chapter.

My whole life revolved around TV as a kid. I would come home and make sure I finished my homework every night by 8 o'clock, generally so that I could sit down and watch TV from 8 to 10. As a kid, it was 'Family Ties' and 'Roseanne' and 'Growing Pains' and 'Perfect Strangers' and 'Golden Girls.' I mean, I watched everything.

My dad was fine about me doing modelling at 16 because I always said school was important to me. I always chose my jobs carefully so I wouldn't have to take too much time off. It got harder toward the end with my A-levels; there were sleepless nights, and I was doing my homework on the plane coming home, but I pulled through.

A 'harmonized' life these days sounds like a tall order. Between housework, homework, workwork, and busywork, there are perpetually too many things to do, and not enough time to find that mythical balance. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling like you're doing doing doing but getting nothing truly done that you really want.

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