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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With a lot of help from my high school teachers, I went to college and became a medical tech at a clinic outside Kansas City.
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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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Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.
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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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The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
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I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.
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Probably spending 12 years at boarding school - comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty.
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When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.
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There are many ingredients that go into making a film. It baffles me, what works and what doesn't.
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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.
