Jodie Foster

And the area of focus was African-American literature.

It's whatever you were doing between the ages of 17 and 22.

Those years are really formative.

And maybe if you were in, I don't know, you went to Rwanda.

and spent three or four years working in a small town, like that would be an extraordinary formative experience.

So it's just about that formation.

And for me, obviously us that have had these great experiences with education, so much of it, yes, is about what you learn, but a lot of it is about the connections that you made with people that taught you how to be a good friend.

And you learned all those hard lessons of people being disappointed in you and then never talking to you again, for example.

Or, you know, I don't know.

I definitely would not be the person that I am.

But I also really feel like I learned to read, not in the real sense of, you know, cat and dog, but to how to look deeply into material, to how to look deeply into people, into relationships, into literature and say, you know, what does this mean?

And what are the different layers of meaning that are there?

And I think that comes in handy every single day of my job.

Well, yeah, we all have different compartments of things that we do.

And I was born like basically in my DNA when I was born, I was born as a head first person.

So I perceive the world as the head first, I think before I feel.

And

A lot of people are the opposite.

A lot of people are kind of stomach first people, instinct first people or heart first people.

I'm just not one of those.