I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.
Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.
I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.
When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.
I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.
I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.
Some friends of mine in the class ahead of me in college were auditioning for graduate school in New York, and then a few of them got into Juilliard, and it sort of opened my eyes. I didn't really know anything about it, but it opened my eyes to a possible next step after school, where I could just deepen my knowledge and also not be responsible for life and stay in school.
I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.
I think if I learned anything in graduate school, it was to not drool around other actors who would normally make you drool.
I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.
I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.
In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.
I love working with women. I think they're beautiful. I like to photograph them. I like the way they interact. When I was in high school I used to hang out with the girls. When I went to graduate school, I was in an all girls school. So it's something I'm very familiar with and quite fascinated by.
I was a 36C or D, and at 5' 1'', I knew that being a small person with big boobs standing in front of an audience was not going to be easy. It would be really hard to get people to pay attention to me without mocking me. Getting a breast reduction to prepare for my career was no different from people who work to get good grades to get into a good college to get into a good graduate school to get a good job. I went down to a B cup, and it was the best thing in the whole world.
Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.
I saw more stupid people in graduate school and three decades in academia than I ever did who ran 100 acres without going broke.
Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.
The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.
I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
I wasn't allowed to see movies when I was a child. It was against the religion I was raised in, Fundamentalist Baptist. I didn't go into a commercial movie house until I was a senior in college, and that was on the sly. It wasn't until I was in graduate school that I immersed myself in films. Then, I went to see all the films by Bergman, Fellini, etc.
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