If I hadn't gone towards boxing, I might have been one of those kids getting into trouble. A lot of my friends did. They were clever kids at school, but they just went down the wrong path.
I think some authors suffer from a need to try to prove that they're clever and educated. I try not to suffer from that. I would rather sacrifice my own narrative in the exercise of writing a biography. So I'm not worried about whether I'm clever.
I was always behind in class. There was people in my class who was amazing at art, amazing at maths, amazing at English, but I wasn't clever with anything, even though I tried my hardest.
The push to defund public schools and reroute taxpayer money to charters and private institutions is actually a very clever strategy by the Right Wing, which has always had a great deal of disdain for a system that forces them to pay taxes toward some other kid's non-religious, science-based education.
I think I'm quite a clever player and that I realise there are times when I can be offensive but others when I must be more compact and work for the team, because that is what matters.
Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.
Elvis Costello's song writing is so peerless and individualistic. It's storytelling and it's deeply intelligent and clever.