Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

I use filming as an excuse to take classes. I got my certification in sailing for 'Wedding Crashers,' and now I can handle a 26-foot boat. I played a seamstress once, so I took sewing classes. I love dipping into these other lives.

This June, I'll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.

What's funny is my mom took me to the theater for the first time when I was six years old, and I was just amazed by it. I just said, 'Hey Mom, can I do this too?' And so she signed me up for little theater classes, and I remember my first audition for a play when I was seven years old was for 'The Thankful Elf.'

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sundays and, if I was lucky, another at the Opera House on Monday after school.

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.

I have taught some master classes and things at my alma mater and sometimes at my kids' school. I will go in and talk to the theater students. I wouldn't really call myself a teacher.

Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written 'Eragon' if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework - I wouldn't have had the time to write.

I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.

There happened to be guitar classes at the college, and there was a guitar teacher there with whom I used to play. In addition, I also would go out into country schools and teach little kids basic guitar and singing a few times a week.

Everybody who makes any kind of policy needs to substitute teach. But you've got to be a real teacher. You can't just go to a couple of classes with the regular teacher there. It is an incredibly hard job.

Socialism appeals to better classes and has far more strength. Attack the state and you excite feelings of loyalty even among the disaffected classes; but attack the industrial system and appeal to the state, and you may have loyalty in your favor.

I don't know why people question the academic training of an athlete. Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

I took a couple of classes in clowning, but that was more like Lucille Ball kind of slapstick, not Ringling Brothers. But we had to do things silently, and the teacher would do this running commentary. 'Does this make Clown sad? Oh, Clown doesn't like that, does Clown?' Always 'Clown.' Never a name.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

In Los Angeles, parenting is a competitive sport. From Beverly Hills baby boutiques to kids' yoga classes, L.A. fuses high style, industrial-strength materialism, and parental outsourcing into our own unique version of child-rearing.

We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don't give alcohol to kids.

Parenting classes should be mandatory, whether you are adopting or not, and would include an evaluation of your current physical, mental and financial state as well as how ready you are to take on the rigors of parenthood. Our children are our most precious natural resource, and there is absolutely no other way to parent but to put them first.

I come from a small village and have had no formal training in music or any classes from the masters of Indian classical music.

Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15.