Ian Rankin Quotes

I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience.

You think you want to be an astronaut, and then after a while you're a geo-major for whatever reason. That's just the way it is in college.

For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course.

In the India I was growing up in, history wasn't really a wise career option. People would joke and say, 'History's okay, but what's your actual job?' I didn't come from a privileged background and couldn't afford to be irresponsible, so I did the pragmatic thing and did a MBA.

My father would not pay for me to study anything but engineering or math in college.

Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.

I wasn't going to be an actor. I was going to be a lawyer. I came from a family just above working class, just below middle class, a great family of wonderful values. The idea of me having a chance for a law degree was enticing. Enticing to me but also very enticing to my family.

At some point, I talked about how I had never graduated college. I dropped out my sophomore year to start MercyMe 21 years ago. Part of the reason was I felt like I was treading water.

I knew at university that medicine was just not for me. I saved many lives by not being a doctor!

I once asked my father what he wanted me to be. To my horror, he said, 'sociologist.'

There was never any question that I would go to college, that I would travel, that I would go to the theater early and often.

My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.

My parents would have loved it if my brother or I had become a doctor or lawyer.

I'm a working class lad. So at 25, and with no-one in our family having any theatrical inclination, when I said, 'I'm going to scratch all that and become an actor,' I may as well have said I was going to be a Premiership footballer for the chance I'd have.

I didn't want to be the rebel who was bottom of the class, so I worked hard. They wanted me to stay on for A-Levels, but football came calling - that was my real love.

In many Asian households, to not go on to higher education, that's like a big no-no. I know my parents' discouragement was for my own protection, and I'm really close to them now, but they didn't understand that there is value in this. That's because they didn't know.

Part of the creative journey for me was not to come up the conventional route. I didn't go through drama school. I chose not to. I came from a very working-class area, a child of Nigerian immigrants.

As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, 'I want to do movies.' Then it was finding the means to do it.

I went to the University of Arizona. I stopped because I went there for two years and I felt like I experienced college or whatever. I'm over it. I like Hollywood better.

I went into college undeclared. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew that music was obviously this central big important thing in my life that I was gonna keep doing.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

I started a French degree at university, but packed it in when I realised I really wanted to be an actor.

For me, the desire exists less to get myself a degree than to just go and have the whole college experience, and throw myself into the brain pool and see if I can swim.

My undergraduate years at the University of Nebraska were a special time in my life: the combination of partying and intellectual awakening that is what the undergraduate years are supposed to be. I went to the university with the goal of becoming an engineer; I had no concept that one could pursue science as a career.

I come from a family of scholars who got their Master's degrees. To my grandma - and to a lot of people - an education was a way of making it out of the worst parts of their life.