Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

My favorite English teacher in high school showed me 'Brazil' when I was 15, and it blew my mind. It's one of those movies that's revealed itself in different ways as I've gone back to it over the years.

I love to read. I'm still pen pals with my ninth-grade English teacher, Mr. Shanley. He tells me what books to read.

I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You'd just tick and cross, whereas if you're an English teacher, you've got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it's insane!

I was a per diem floater in the same junior high school I went to. I sat in the office and made $42.50 a day, and whenever a teacher was absent, I'd substitute. I taught everything from English to auto shop.

I'm an English teacher, so I'm used to reading and I'm used to reading out loud.

I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.

A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell's Soup kid.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.

I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city's worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city's Students Federation.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

When I was in prep school, an English teacher said to me, 'Hemingway, I expect more from you!' And I said, 'Why, sir?'

My brother is a policeman; my sister's an English teacher. When I hear what they make versus what I make, it's ridiculous.

I taught myself English. My English teacher was the sitcom 'Friends.' Back in the days when I was, like, 15, 14, it was like a syndrome for Korean parents to make their kids watch 'Friends.' I thought I was a victim at that time, but now I'm the lucky one.

I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.

All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.