Quotes About Ambition

I had very much wanted to be the very first black female editor-in-chief of 'Vogue.' Barring that, I wanted to work at 'Entertainment Weekly.'

I remember hoping there'd be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don't want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show.

As far as television is concerned, I'm just not interested in working on a series. Why should I settle for being someone's second banana? And that weekly grind is unrewarding and too demanding.

I've been running my own record label and doing my weekly radio shows, but people don't see the work. People only see your rise instead of the whole thing.

I sometimes think how strange it is that I've got to do exactly what I want, and that is difficult to cope with. You have to remind yourself every few weeks: I'm making this film and this is exactly what I want to do. And suddenly you're happy again.

When I finished school, I took my entire life savings - $5,000 - and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur, and I was proud. And in six weeks, I was broke.

I went off to Harvard Law School for six weeks, and then I said, 'Doggone this, it's not what I want to do.' I remember when I told my dad I was leaving law school, and I wanted to go into football. He said, 'Be a good coach.'

My parents made me finish high school before I started acting, and I did, like, two weeks of fine arts college before I was like, 'This sucks. I'm going!' I got a few small jobs, and then I booked a big-for-Canada feature.

You spend most of your time as an actor unemployed, so you're not going to hear me complaining that I haven't had a day off in three weeks.

Sitting beside the pool is fine for two weeks, but after that I think it'd be quite hard to live with - so I need to keep racing.

I grew up dreaming of being on Broadway and being able to do that - and 'Hamilton' - was awesome, and it was the hardest thing for the first few weeks, and then it was the easiest thing.

Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'

Then, for a hot three or four weeks I wanted to be a concert pianist.

I was hired as a sous-chef at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. The chef liked to drink - some mornings we would find him sleeping. Two weeks after its opening, I became the chef. I was 20 years old, and way over my head. I had to hire the cooks and do the menus.

I have to feel that I'm going somewhere all the time. By definition, if you have this urge to go places, then you can't be 100 percent happy where you are. It's not like I enjoy being miserable for weeks on end. But I think it's good to be miserable for about one day every third week - that's ideal for me.

Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.

I love being on the road, but to make a living as a road comic, you have to be on it most weeks out of the year. That's just too much for me. But I would love to be such a successful road comic that I don't have to go on it every week.

Actors, you have to wait for people to give you work, or you have to make your own stuff. But standup, I could just say, 'I want to do standup in 30 minutes,' and I can go do standup. Or I could just say, 'I want to do standup in a few weeks in this city.'

The magic of landing my first role on Broadway went 'poof' in a matter of a few weeks.

I'm a very competitive person, and I always competed with myself. Every year, I'd take six weeks with my band, crew and choreographer to put a new show together. We'd spend eight hours per day, seven days per week putting a show together to beat the last year's show.

I remember my guidance counselor, when I told her I wanted to apply to Harvard, she paused and said, 'That's in New York, right?' The funny thing is, I didn't really know. It was a few weeks before I was like, 'No, I think it's in Massachusetts.'

It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn't reaping the lion's share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.

You weigh your pros and cons and what's real. You want to play baseball? Yeah. You want to go to school? If that's the best option, than that is what it is.

If you set goals for yourself, and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them; it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more.