Lauren Willig Quotes

I was raised by a single mother, and she felt the Japanese education system, albeit wonderful, keeps you in a certain range. You have to be better than this level but below this level.

Being in school and doing the fighting stuff, it is very tough. I had school work all the way from Monday through Friday, and then on the weekends, you had homework, engineering projects and stuff. That makes it very tough.

My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.

I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

Most Indians go into education. Their parents just push them into education like parents in Australia push them into sports.

You've really got to start hitting the books because it's no joke out here.

Sundays in my teens were spent on homework: from 8 am until at least 8 pm, with stoppages to be fed and watered. I was carrying up to ten subjects simultaneously.

I spent 10 years working on a math Ph.D., and I finally got kind of good at it.

I think my father, who was Chinese, basically felt if we didn't major in science, we would starve on the streets, so we all went into science unquestioningly. I kind of faked my way through physics.

I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough.

I have never gotten a B in my life. I would honestly be mortified if I got a B. I'm so academically driven.

My dad was fine about me doing modelling at 16 because I always said school was important to me. I always chose my jobs carefully so I wouldn't have to take too much time off. It got harder toward the end with my A-levels; there were sleepless nights, and I was doing my homework on the plane coming home, but I pulled through.

The most important thing I learned at the University of Florida is that a Ph.D. and writing papers is very important in the United States.

Some of my academic friends think I've fallen from a very special grace.

At boarding school there wasn't much time for much of anything except education.

As the daughter of two teachers with first-class degrees, I'd always seen myself as a duffer by comparison.

I went to a very academically competitive high school. So I was always quite studious and quiet, just to keep up with the other geniuses who were in my school.

It's not imperative that I graduate in four years, and it's not imperative that I get all A's.

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.