Quotes About Ambition

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

The Hercules' was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built... I put the sweat of my life into this thing.

I looked back at the years since I'd left college and thought of the list of things I'd have liked to do. I'd always wanted to write a book - not a small undertaking. I never felt I had the time or creative energy to spare in order to write one as well as I wanted.

I just remember when I came out of film school - and I loved film school - that the industry was such a mystery. How to break in, and once you are in, how to make a film; that is such a large undertaking. There are thousands of pitfalls.

I want to go to a place that's undervalued, where the potential is great, a place that wants to win, not just participate, in football.

Nothing really comes easy to you when you're under-recruited, you're undersized, you're undervalued. It's a situation where you have to be better than the bigger guys.

One doesn't need money to run for Parliament, but it is undoubtedly expensive.

London is undoubtedly one of the most exciting places in the world in which to work, attracting hundreds of thousands of people of all abilities and backgrounds each year seeking to make a name for themselves.

Because we are in the same company, we have the same influence undoubtedly. 2NE1 has been very successful in many ways and I don't know if we can make it as far, but we will try to do it on our own.

Uneasy lies the head that craves the crown.

There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated.

We were kids that didn't have any education. None of our parents were in the music business or even college graduates. We didn't have someone guiding us. We were just uneducated kids from the middle of nowhere that suddenly had a band going around the world.

I am not joking when I state that I remained uneducated because I could not afford education.

Coming out of Juilliard, I honestly was expecting and willing to be breaking my neck, hustling, and being unemployed for a decade, two decades. I was gritting my teeth, but I was so down to do that.

I totally remember that: being 25 and unemployed and trying to stretch each cappuccino for 60 minutes.

My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.

Basically, after an ABC sitcom I did, I ended up with a holding deal with 20th Century Fox. Absolutely cool. It pays you to be unemployed. And the bigger the entity that gives you the deal, the better.

I'm constantly paranoid that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life... and have to go back folding shirts at the Gap, which you know... you gotta do what you gotta do.

My novel got published, and I became a paid writer, which was nice, and then it came out, and nobody bought it, so I became an unemployed writer again.

I was never very good at being an unemployed actor. I always thought that I should have been doing something pro-active. I was never good at doing juvenile leads. I suppose it's because I have this big sarcastic head on me.

I think actors always have that fear of unemployment so when the opportunities are there, you just jump on them.

Juilliard was four years, and I called it 'med school with guaranteed unemployment at the end.' And it ends: you're getting ready to go out and be an actor, and... nothing.

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

To tackle the scourge of young unemployment we need to be ambitious.