I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

My mom was an aesthetician and she went to beauty school back in the '60s. I just remember watching her do her makeup all the time. She always had her nails done makeup on - her face was ready to go when she went out. I loved it.

I learned the truth at seventeen That love was meant for beauty queens And high school girls with clear skinned smiles Who married young and then retired.

I am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin you weren't cool popular beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television.

I was kind of a jock in school. Beauty wasn't something I spent a lot of time on.

My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

My dad instilled in me a great sense of humor. I wasn't bullied at school because my outward attitude was confident and that helps.

The phenomenon of home schooling is a wonderful example of the American can-do attitude. Growing numbers of parents have become disenchanted with government-run public schools. Many parents have simply taken matters into their own hands literally.

I was always the guy getting kicked out of my classes at school for having an attitude problem.

I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough.

I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fawning over 'All My Children' and Erica her clothes and her narcissistic attitude.

I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work taking any jobs I could get.

I think a lot of times we don't pay enough attention to people with a positive attitude because we assume they are naive or stupid or unschooled.

I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues ' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.

There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s) I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.

Becoming emancipated at 14 my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company Flower Films and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30 I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography and I want to take an art history class.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

Growing up going to Christian school and the concept that you're born a sinner and you don't really have a choice to change who you are has been hammered into my head and created the entire reason why I made art and made a band and made records called 'Antichrist Superstar.'

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art poems schools theology displacing all that exists or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.