Quotes About Ambition

If something nice comes my way, I will take it up. It has to be something substantial. I am not saying that I have to do films like 'The Dirty Picture' or 'Kahaani.' It could be something commercial as well.

Your big movie stars who've been in blockbusters generating a lot of dollars are looking for the meatier, substantive roles that they think will make the awards season.

It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from - there's no substitute for hard work.

Love what you do. There's always going to be someone else who's smarter than you, but there's no substitute for passion. People who are passionate always work the hardest, and that sets them apart.

Like every player, I want to start more matches rather than be used as a substitute.

Like all players, I do not like being a substitute.

Usually, you lose interest in a story beyond a certain point. But with 'Highway,' there was something very subtle, yet something very influential. I intended 'Highway' to be the first film that I ever made. Didn't happen.

I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.

Can I be a leading man? I don't believe myself to be; I don't think that I am, but I'm in this place as a performer where I think about how to make things smaller, more subtle.

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.

My ambition was to be cosmopolitan. I grew up in the suburbs. I went to college in Maine. I had a dream in my head that if you wanted to be the most urbane, living-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, Paris was the place to be.

I expected to be doing basement theater in the suburbs of Stockholm.

I'm from the suburbs, really, so I actually didn't go to Montreal until I was, like, 19. I wasn't allowed to go to the city at night or really be in the scene with other producers. It was hard for my parents to understand what I was trying to do as an artist, but it didn't stop me. They eventually saw that it wasn't a joke.

Football is open to anyone, especially somebody like me who grew up in the Paris suburbs.

I'm very drawn to subversive comedy like Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman. But at the end of the day, if you want to do great work, you have to pay your dues.

I remember how my mom would take me on the subway from Queens to Broadway. We'd go to the offices of casting agents. Many doors were slammed in our faces. I was just a boy, but I remember that well.

I had this temp receptionist job in New York, and I kind of hated it, and in the morning I would come out of the subway and just walk along the New York streets with all these people around me and kind of sing to myself. Like, 'She's gonna make it!'

I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

To succeed, one must be creative and persistent.

If you want to succeed, you have to take the necessary risks and the occasional leap in the dark.

All of us, in a sense, struggle continuously all the time, because we never get what we want. The important thing which I've really learned is how do you not give up, because you never succeed in the first attempt.

You've got to have this burning desire in your chest to succeed.

We need people who dream impossible things, who maybe fail, sometimes succeed, but in any case who have that ambition.

You do not succeed because you do not know what you want, but because you don't want it intensely enough.