I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that…

I come from an academic background. I wasn't raised to be into promoting myself.

— Michael Heizer

Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an…

— Michael Hirst

I come from an academic background, and I have a genuine interest in social change.

— Amanda Seales

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

— Nell Freudenberger

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic…

— Bernice Johnson Reagon

My mom and dad put my brother and sister through university and they were very keen for us to have an academic background just…

— Rob James-Collier

Merit should count more than academic background.

— Lee Myung-bak

I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so…

— Derek Walcott

I didn't go to university. I don't have an academic background.

— Sean Mathias

I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his…

— Leonard Susskind

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.

— Paul Giamatti

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense.…

— Sarah Vowell

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

— Grace Paley

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak…

— Graham Joyce

Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you…

— Marlene van Niekerk