Quotes About Ambition

What happened was, I always wanted to be a singer/songwriter kind of guy like a James Taylor or Crosby, Stills and Nash type of thing; I went to a lot of coffee houses and used to watch all those guys, but I never had the nerve to get up and do it because singing seems so personal and intimate to me. It was too revealing.

I remember once Robert Taylor invited me to lunch. I asked him, 'What is your ambition?' He said, 'I want to have 10 very good suits.'

For me, it was watching the New York Giants growing up, with Bill Parcells and Lawrence Taylor and that whole crew coming up through the '80s. And then, as I moved on to college, I thought I'd want to coach for sure.

Everyone wants to be an arena act, and it's making country music evolve. People are cutting things more for that arena environment. But who's to say that that is a sign of any more of a successful career than what James Taylor has been able to do, when he still comes and plays the Ryman every two years?

I definitely want to work with Kanye, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande - all the big people.

We came up with all these crazy ideas that Taylor Swift could be the biggest artist in the world - and it came true - and that we could have five labels and become the biggest independent record company in the world - and it came true.

I want to add 'record mogul' to my list of accomplishments and make a disgusting amount of money so I can buy a house between Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus.

Be kind to each other. You never know who's going to become the CEO of what. You never know who is going to become Taylor Swift. You never know.

It might be interesting to people to say that I would do something with Taylor Swift, but the reality is, it's so not on my list of things to do.

I want to write with Taylor Swift!

When we signed Taylor Swift, people said, 'You're signing a 15-year-old female country artist? Good luck!'

The second we were done on 'The Sing-Off,' we were like, 'All right, now we're competing with Rihanna and Taylor Swift.' We've always set the bar high. We want a hit.

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

Before 'Life of Pi,' I wanted to do economics. And now, I realize how bad a mistake that would have been. I just can't see it as my cup of tea anymore.

I did B com but realised that it was not my cup of tea. I was always fascinated by animation, and after I completed my course, I wanted to go abroad and pursue it. I used to sketch a lot and was rather serious about it. But all this was until I joined films.

After university, I went into film. I started out making tea, managed a brief stint as an assistant director, then found myself writing a screenplay. In the end, I wrote quite a few - but by January 2006, I wanted out.

I used to clean the sets and serve tea to the artistes.

After university, I was desperate to be an ambassador. It went back to geography: I loved the idea of living in exotic and exciting countries, but still driving a Land Rover and having tea. I failed the Foreign Office exams three times.

I am so grateful every day to do a job that I love. That is the key to life and what I would like to teach my daughter: do something you love and even if you're not good at it, just blag it.

I would want to teach my children someday that they should strive to be successful.

Teach your daughters, teach your granddaughters, everybody has to have something that they're good at where they can earn a living.

I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.

Before I had decided to get into politics, I was laying the groundwork to have a career in the law, but that was really to lay the foundation to teach, either at the college level or law school level after my federal clerkships.

I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can't teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is.