myself

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me - to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That's normally how I perform. That's how I am.

I am a teacher. It's how I define myself. A good teacher isn't someone who gives the answers out to their kids but is understanding of needs and challenges and gives tools to help other people succeed. That's the way I see myself, so whatever it is that I will do eventually after politics, it'll have to do a lot with teaching.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

I found myself facing a Christian Science Reading Room. My God! It had been eight years. There had never been any renunciation of religion on my part, but like so many people, it was a gradual fading away.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring.

I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.

I consider myself to have been the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching. Before I came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them.

I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.

So many times, people told me I can't do this or can't do that. My nature is that I don't listen very well. I'm very determined, and I believe in myself. My parents brought me up that way. Thank God for that. I don't let anything stand in my way.

I don't see myself as a famous person.

I just wanted to be an actress. It never occurred to me that I could become famous, because I'm not one of those people who's automatically going to be the lead. I always saw myself as the mate.

I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.

When I'm living in the world of luxury and celebrity, which is where I found myself for a large part of my life, it's a walk-on part. Not a vital necessity, like it is for so many people. I enjoy it but I can see right through it!