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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There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.
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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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When I was a lad in my 20s, as carefree and debonair as any other underpaid newspaperman, I happened to be a golfer who could flirt with par fairly often, and I was adventurous enough in those days to play any known or unknown thief who showed up at Goat Hills for whatever amount he fancied.
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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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Ego is one of the biggest weapons that is used to take us down. It's self-destructive. It's a problem on all levels - even regular people can have big ego problems.
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Fame is very much a double-edged sword.
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It's never over. You don't want to be in the position to be down four runs in the ninth inning, but it's not over until the last out.
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Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.
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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.
