Duncan Jones Quotes
I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.
Quotes to Explore
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My mom teaches sixth grade and also taught first grade at one point. She's into dressing up and costumes and designing her own curriculum that way. She stayed home for about eight years with me and my sister when we were young before going back to teaching, so we had a lot of time with her. She taught us to read really early.
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I started getting really interested in comedy when I was in middle school.
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I promised my mom that if, after a year of putting 150 percent into my career it didn't work out, I would go back to school. I never did go back.
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When I went to drama school, I knew I was at least as talented as other students, but because I was a black man and I wasn't pretty, I knew I would have to work my butt off to be the best that I would be, and to be noticed.
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I was always told at school that you had to have a back-up plan, but all I ever wanted to do was act. There was no plan B for me.
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Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.
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Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
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I was convinced in middle school that I invented tight-rolling your pants, because I would get hand-me-downs from my brothers, and of course they were bell-bottoms from the '70s. So I would fold and fold over the bells. I like to think I started the trend. But I didn't.
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It is not weird for a dad to be doing the dishes, the laundry, and taking the kids to school, and read them stories for bed.
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I played the trumpet for nine years, and then I joined the choir after that, and then I was in musicals in high school.
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We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.
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The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient.
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The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.
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I got the travel bug when I was quite young. My parents took me and my sisters out of school and we travelled all over Europe. It was an eye-opening experience and, although I love Norway, I also enjoy visiting new countries. I don't get homesick.
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When I was growing up, we were taught in school that North Koreans, and especially the North Korean leadership, were all devils.
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I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.
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I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.
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The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
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When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
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I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?
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The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.
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I was born just barely south of the Mason Dixon line.
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I'm willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas.
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I was in my 30s when I finally went to film school. It was kind of always going to happen, but I did try to keep it suppressed for awhile.
