It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
One of the brilliant things I realised after I'd left school is that there are so many ways you can learn. I do this best on the job.
I've never been a big believer in formal education.
I always believe that a person can learn so much by just jumping into something and trying to do it rather than having someone else teach you everything.
I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.
I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.
I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.
My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.
Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
Being homeschooled for half of my life allowed me to choose my own curriculum and find things I really enjoy, and that's kind of inspired me. I've always been intrigued in or interested in the topics I've been covering.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.
Don't get me wrong: school is good and all, but school is way too slow for me. Like, super slow. So I didn't want to go. I wanted to learn on my own with real life experiences.
I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.
School is not for me. I'm volatile and hate being told what to do.
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.
I taught myself more in the library than school taught me.
No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.
Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves.
Looking back now, if I went to film school, it probably would have helped knowing what the best of the best of foreign films were, but that wasn't the case. In some ways, I think that led to my originality, because I hadn't seen anybody else.
Almost everything I've been paid to do was something that was largely self-taught.
When I say 'homeschooled,' I was homeschooled for, like, two years, and then we just stopped. It was me and my parents, and they'd give me homework and stuff like that, but then one day, they just stopped.
