Quotes About Work

Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living, and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.

Well, I have a farm in Vermont that's my main residence, where I do lots of digging and mowing, and ride tractors - just so you don't get the wrong idea that I'm too girlie!

Working 24 hours a day isn't enough anymore. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, including your personal life, your family life, maybe more. If people think it's any less, they're wrong, and they will fail.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.

Competitiveness that I've had as a player, competitiveness that was pointed in the wrong direction and went over the line. It's obviously something that I needed to work on and address.

In the past, I had a knee-jerk approach to work, and it showed on screen. I was doing movies for the wrong reasons - trying to juggle dates, do too many guest appearances, take up projects under pressure or for emotional reasons.

I've discovered that the standard all-American dream of fame and fortune is not success for me. Success for me is simply the joy of working - doing good work - and then bringing that joy home to my family. But if what I do in my work doesn't enrich my life with my family, I'm doing the wrong thing.

When you spend such a large portion of your life working - and it's not fun, and you're worried about getting sued or fired for saying the wrong thing or for acting crazy at a work party - then what has work done to America? That's the impetus to have a huge office Christmas party.

I've played historical characters before, and I think the trap of all of them is if you try to do an impression. If that's what you're working on when you're doing a scene, then your focus is on the wrong thing.

When you start thinking it is a party instead of putting your suit and tie on and getting your job done and handling your business, you are thinking about the wrong thing.

I'm convinced we go to school at the wrong time. I'd have been delighted, aged 12, to get out into the world and earn some money doing something menial.

There's no right way or wrong way to work. There's only your way.

I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward looking versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.

TV's hard work. I don't know how the hell Angela Lansbury survived doing 'Murder, She Wrote' all those years. And sure, everyone wants to be Bruce Willis or George Clooney - they want to be in film for the range of characters you get to play.

My mom's a lawyer. She was part of the group that wrote the bar exam. My father is a dentist. They've always worked.

When I wrote 'The Rozabal Line,' I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed 'The Rozabal Line' as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.

My mother wrote lyrics and sang but was overtaken by life with four children and worked.

I grew up - my dad, every time I was with my dad, he was always - not always, but he wrote. He's a writer. So he was always in his office writing. He made a plan and, like, a point of, 'This is my work. I'm going to do this every day for these amount of hours.' So I think that's where I got, like, a work sort of ethic.

I had a nice part at big newspapers, small newspapers, and then I went to a very big newspaper - 'The Wall Street Journal.' I wrote longer pieces, and I got tired of working so hard on stories that had a shelf life of essentially one day. So then I started working on longer magazine pieces and realized then that you might as well be writing a book.

I'm not successful in Hollywood, and I probably would never be. I think Hollywood has such an interesting model for success, and it creates those successful people. I'm not in that chosen category, but what is successful for me is that, in spite of that, I've been able to work and do the things that I wrote down that I wanted to do and be.

My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'

The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.

When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.