Alek Wek Quotes
I had jobs from the age of 14, when I arrived in London as a refugee. Aged 17, I'd get up at 4 A.M. to work as a cleaner before school. It wasn't pleasant.
Quotes to Explore
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My second-grade teacher went around the class and asked everybody what they were going to be when they grew up. I said, 'I want to travel the world,' and he said, 'You'll be married and pregnant by 21, just like all the girls in this room.'
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I call myself a feminist, not a feminist filmmaker. If somebody asked me if I had a feminist sensibility it would be pretty hard to deny, but is it the theme of my work? Not necessarily. I'm interested in a lot of things.
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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 brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.
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I gave up school. I gave up a really, really good job. I gave up a lot of stuff. I cut a lot of people out of my life so I could just focus on my fighting dreams.
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I was singing in a mall, and I picked a girl to come up onstage with me. As I was grabbing her hand, I fell off the stage. It felt like I was in the air forever, flying like Superman.
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But generally I am fine with a capital F; probably in extraordinary shape for a man of my age.
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If you're passionate about your work, it makes the people around you want to be involved too.
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Award shows, like the Grammys, were tough on us early in hip-hop, not even televising our categories or splitting them up on best male or female or any of that. We had to earn them.
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I want to play in as many theatres as possible, work with as many brilliant people as possible, but definitely do a new play.
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I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers.
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It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of theirs to show up in my trash - which the FBI had been going through.
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Acting was something that I grew up just doing. I certainly never thought about it.
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Sometimes, in order to follow our moral compass and/or our hearts, we have to make unpopular decisions or stand up for what we believe in.
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There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.
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I just keep doing what I'm doing and don't ever give up.
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I was very energetic and very small. I didn't start growing until the last year of high school.
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I'm getting to be a real pro at coming into things midstream and trying to catch up.
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I feel growing up in Mumbai is an advantage, as we grow up speaking so many languages that when we go abroad, it becomes easier to learn new languages.
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I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.
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These guys don't play it at a level like a Vince Carter or Tracy McGrady or myself.
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I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
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I still enjoy my life, and I feel like I've achieved enough things that if I never did anything again, I'd feel confident that I'd still have made my mark in some way. But maybe the self-loathing bit is the element that makes you strive for more. Makes you strive to be better.
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I had jobs from the age of 14, when I arrived in London as a refugee. Aged 17, I'd get up at 4 A.M. to work as a cleaner before school. It wasn't pleasant.
