Early Life and Education
Neil Diamond was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. His father, Akeeba Diamond, was a dry-goods merchant. Diamond grew up in several homes in Brooklyn, attending Abraham Lincoln High School.
At Lincoln, the school from which he received his high school diploma, he was a member of the fencing team. He later attended New York University on a fencing scholarship, specializing in saber, and was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship team; into his adult life he maintained his swordsmanship skills and continued to warm up with fencing exercises before his concerts. In a live interview with TV talk show host Larry King, Diamond explained his decision to study medicine by pointing out:
I actually wanted to be a laboratory biologist. I wanted to study. And I really wanted to find a cure for cancer. My grandmother had died of cancer. And I was always very good at the sciences. And I thought I would go and try and discover the cure for cancer.
However, during his senior year in New York University, a music publishing company made him an offer he could not refuse: an offer to write songs for $50 a week. This started him on the road to stardom.
Read more about this topic: Neil Diamond
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)