I've never been a big believer in formal education.
First I was going to be a football player, then after that try to study medicine or engineering. But it was very difficult to do medicine, so I did engineering.
What's the first thing I remember about the University of New Brunswick? That's easy. The year before I had gone to Mount St. Vincent in Halifax, which was an all girls' school. That didn't really work out for me. But at UNB, there were six or seven men for every woman, which suited me just fine.
I decided that I didn't want to spend my time in a liberal arts college.
If I was going to go to college, I had to have a scholarship. By my sophomore year, it was evident golf was not going to be the path.
When I was in college, I walked by the journalism school every day on my way to my own classes, and that's the closest I've come to having any sort of journalism background.
My mother didn't feel very satisfied about the English background that I had received in the public schools in Littleton. So, she insisted that I take a year under the high school level. So, I was in boarding school nine years.
Coming into community college, I wasn't sure of where I wanted to go in my future.
Regardless of any deviations, it was clear I was supposed to end up in math and physics.
I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961.
I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.
Where did I study? I went to P.S. 6. I went to Collegiate, Middlesex, Tufts, Juilliard.
I was good at math and science, and it was expected that I would attend the University of Washington in Seattle and become an engineer. But by the time I was seventeen, I was ready to leave home, a decision my parents agreed to support if I could obtain a scholarship. MIT did not grant me one, but the University of Chicago did.
I didn't go to college.
My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.
If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.
I've been a big astrophysics nut since I was 12. I have always had a real soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum mechanics. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school - I'm just not that good at math.
I was a dance major at NYU, but it wasn't working out. I had friends in the drama department, so I switched.
So when I had to make a decision whether I would like to do honors degree course in Islamic studies and Malay studies too, so I thought Islamic studies would be good.
I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.
In 1960, I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at UNAM, as this was then the closest way to become a physical chemist, taking math-oriented courses not available to chemistry majors.
I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn't want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn't conceive of how one would be an actor.
I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don't ossify.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
But I decided I wanted more education and I had to make a choice between starting law school, which was interesting to me, and going for a graduate degree in engineering.
