My father had a brilliant scholastic record in high school and was awarded a college scholarship. Unfortunately he had to turn it down so that he could continue to support his family.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was an all-sport athlete growing up. My dad, I think, hoped I would go to college on a scholarship.
My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that.
When the time came for me to go to college, there was only one scholarship that my high school offered at the time and I didn't win that one, but that didn't stop me. I went on to college anyway. I worked my way through it and paid my student loans for 11 years.
I was the youngest of seven kids and I would not have been able to go to college without an athletic scholarship.
I turned down a scholarship to Yale. The problem with college is that there's a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you'll never be successful.
My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.
My mother had been a grade-school teacher, and my father had an eighth-grade education.
My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad's union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.
I had been accepted to film school, but my parents couldn't afford it, and yet they made too much money for me to get a scholarship.
While my parents never had the time or money to secure university education themselves, they were adamant that their children should. In comfort and in love, we were taught the joys of knowledge and of work well done. I only regret that neither my mother nor my father could live to see the day I would accept the Nobel Prize.